Overlord (Pan Military Classics)

by Hastings, Max

  The German soldier was denied the sustaining force granted to the Allied armies – the certainty of final victory. But Hohenstein claimed that he and others were motivated above all by ‘two words – “unconditional surrender”. If for the rest of my life I was to chop wood in Canada or Siberia, then I would sooner die in Normandy.’ There is no doubt that President Roosevelt’s insistence upon a public declaration of the unconditional surrender doctrine, despite Churchill’s deep misgivings, was of immense value to the Nazi propaganda machine: it stifled many Germans’ private hopes of some honourable escape from the war. They believed that defeat in Normandy, and beyond that defeat in Europe, would inaugurate a new dark age for Germany, a ghastly destiny for the German people. Their very sense of community with their American and British opponents, coupled with their view of the Russians as barbarians from another planet, compounded their self-delusions. To the bitter end, many German soldiers harboured a sincere belief that they could make common cause with the western Allies against the Russians. To this end, they told themselves that it was essential to sustain a front until some agreement could be achieved.

  There is also little doubt of the validity of the traditional view of the German soldier as naturally obedient and dedicated, far more so than most men of the Allied armies. He was a soldier, and therefore he fought. The British had come to terms with this reality over many years, but Americans were still astonished to discover the strength of this apparently unreasoning approach.

  Several times during the European campaign, [wrote Bradley] I wondered why German commanders in the field did not give up their senseless resistance. Prolonged resistance could do nothing but aggravate the disaster that had already claimed the Reich. George Patton offered an answer when he visited Army Group early in August just as we tightened our noose around the German Seventh Army. ‘The Germans are either crazy or they don’t know what’s going on,’ I said, ‘surely the professionals must know by now that the jig is up.’ George answered by telling the story of a German general that Third Army had captured several days before. He had been asked by G-2 why he had not surrendered before, if only to spare Germany further destruction. ‘I am a professional,’ he replied without emotion, ‘and I obey my orders.’31

  Most of the German army in Normandy followed his example.

  Weapons

  If the German army was a superb fighting instrument, a decisive factor in its ability to defend Normandy for so long, and to such effect, was the superiority of almost all its weapons in quality, if not in quantity, to those of the Allied ground forces. In the air and at sea, the Allies achieved a large measure of technological as well as numerical dominance in the second half of the Second World War. Yet the industrial resources of Britain and America were never applied to provide their armies with weapons of the same quality as those produced by German industry in the face of the Allies’ strategic bombing offensive. In 1942, Albert Speer and his staff took the decision, since they could not hope to match the quantitative superiority of the Allies, to attempt to defeat them by the qualitative superiority of German equipment. Feats on the battlefield, such as Captain Wittman’s ravaging of the British armoured column at Villers-Bocage, were only made possible by the extraordinary power of a Tiger tank in among even a regiment of British Cromwells. During the first weeks in Normandy, Allied tank units were dismayed to discover the ease with which their Shermans ‘brewed up’ after a single hit, while their own shells were unable to penetrate a Panther, far less a Tiger tank, unless they struck a vital spot at close range. On 24 June, Montgomery’s Chief of Staff, de Guingand, wrote to him: ‘If we are not careful, there will be a danger of the troops developing a Tiger and Panther complex . . . P. J. Grigg rang me up last night and said he thought there might be trouble in the Guards Armoured Division as regards “the inadequacy of our tanks compared with the Germans” . . . Naturally the reports are not being circulated.’1 Montgomery himself quashed a succession of complaints and open expressions of concern.

  ‘I have had to stamp very heavily on reports that began to be circulated about the inadequate quality of our tanks, equipment, etc., as compared with the Germans . . .’ he wrote to Brooke. ‘In cases where adverse comment is made on British equipment such reports are likely to cause a lowering of morale and a lack of confidence among the troops. It will generally be found that when the equipment at our disposal is used properly and the tactics are good, we have no difficulty in defeating the Germans.’2

  Montgomery knew that it was futile, indeed highly dangerous, to allow the shortcomings of Allied weapons to be voiced openly in his armies, for there was no hope of quickly changing them. The battle must be won or lost with the arms that the Allies had to hand. The Americans, characteristically, felt less disposed to keep silence about technical failure. On 3 July, Eisenhower complained formally to the US War Department about the shortcomings of many of his army’s weapons, following a meeting in France at which, ‘from Monty and Brooke E learnt that our AT equipment and our 76 mm in Shermans are not capable of taking on Panthers and Tigers.’3 General James Gavin of the American 82nd Airborne Division described how his men first came to understand these things in Italy:

  For years we had been told that our weapons were superior to any that we would encounter. After all, we were soldiers from the most highly industrialised and the richest nation on earth. But that very preoccupation with our advanced technology caused many to assume that technology alone would win battles – more emphasis was placed upon victory through air power than victory through better infantry . . . Our problems stemmed very often from the lack of imagination, if not lack of intelligence, of those responsible for developing infantry weapons.4

  The Americans indeed possessed an excellent rifle in the semiautomatic Garand, and the British an adequate one in the bolt-action Lee-Enfield. But on the European battlefield, as commanders learned, men seldom fired their rifles. They had little need of accuracy when they did so, for they could rarely distinguish a target. American research showed that, in many regiments, only 15 per cent of riflemen used their weapons in any given action. What mattered was the weight of fire to saturate the battle area. For this, the Germans possessed the supreme weapons in their MG 34 and 42 machine-guns – invariably known among the Allies as Spandaus – with their fabulous rate of fire drowning out the measured hammer of the British bren or the American BAR squad light machine-gun. The MG 42’s tearing, rasping 1,200 rounds a minute, against the bren’s 500, proved deeply demoralizing to men advancing against it. A German infantry company carried 16 machine-guns, compared to the British 9, and the American 11, although the heavy Vickers and Brownings of the Allied support companies somewhat redressed this balance.

  The handle on the German ‘potato-masher’ hand grenade enabled it to be thrown further than its British or American counterparts. The German Schmeisser was a far superior submachine gun to the American ‘grease gun’ or the British sten, which the War Office had ordered in quantity, in an eccentric moment in 1941, although it derived from a German patent sensibly spurned by the Wehrmacht. All the German small arms enjoyed a significant advantage over their American counterparts – in using ammunition with powder which produced less flash and smoke. It was markedly easier for a German soldier to pinpoint American fire than vice versa, a technological advantage upon which Marshall commented acidly in a post-war report.

  The Germans had made themselves masters in the handling of mortars. Their mortar ‘stonks’, landing without warning in the middle of Allied positions, inaudible in transit because of their slow flight, grated the nerves of every British and American unit in Normandy, and were responsible for an extraordinarily high proportion of casualties – 75 per cent for much of the campaign. Every infantry division possessed some 60 81 mm and up to 20 120 mm mortars, which could throw a 35-pound bomb 6,000 yards. The Allies also, of course, possessed mortars, but never mastered the art of concentrating them with the devastating effect that the Germans achieved. Above all, men de
tested the Nebelwerfer, the multi-barrelled projector whose bombs were fitted with a brilliantly conceived siren, causing them to wail as they flew through the air, which had an effect on those who heard them often more penetrating than their explosive power. Nebelwerfers came in three sizes: 150 mm (75-pound bomb, 7,300-yard range); 210 mm (248-pound, 8,600-yard); 300 mm (277-pound, 5,000-yard). Each of the five regiments of these – the bulk of them concentrated in the British sector in Normandy – contained 60 or 70 projectors, some of them track-mounted. German infantry anti-tank weapons were also markedly superior. British battalions were equipped only with a spring-loaded projector named the PIAT, which threw a 2½-pound bomb 115 yards and demanded strong nerves from its aimer, who knew that if he lingered long enough to fire at his target with a chance of success, failure meant probable extinction. Even in short-range tests in England, the PIAT scored only 57 per cent hits. The American bazooka packed a wholly inadequate projectile for penetrating German tank armour. The Germans, meanwhile, were equipped in Normandy with the excellent Panzerfaust, the finest infantry anti-tank weapon of the war. Gavin’s paratroopers seized and employed as many as they could capture.

  At a higher level Allied artillery and anti-tank guns were good and plentiful. Indeed, every army fighting in Normandy singled out the British and American artillery as the outstanding arm of the Allied forces. Artillery was responsible for more than half the casualties inflicted in the Second World War. Normandy was the first campaign in which the British used the new discarding-sabot ammunition5 for their 6- and 17-pounders, with formidable penetrating effect. But the towed anti-tank gun was of little value to troops in attack, and even very accurate artillery fire proved an uncertain method of destroying enemy troops who were well dug in. The British 25-pounder was a fine gun, outranging the American 105 mm by 13,400 yards to 12,200, and was immensely valuable for ‘keeping heads down’. But it lacked killing power against defensive positions. It was essential to bring down medium or heavy artillery fire for decisive effect, and there was never enough of this to go round. Nor did the Allies possess any weapon with the physical and moral effect of the German 88 mm, the very high velocity anti-aircraft gun that had been used against ground targets with dazzling success since the early days of the war. Time after time in Normandy, a screen of 88 mm guns stopped an Allied attack dead. Firing high-explosive airburst shells, it was also formidable against infantry. The unforgettable lightning crack of an 88 mm remained implanted in the memory of every survivor of the campaign. It was a mystery to the Allied armies why their own industries failed to build a direct copy of the 88 mm, the Schmeisser, or the potato-masher.

  Yet the greatest failure was that of the tank. How could American and British industries produce a host of superb aircraft, an astonishing variety of radar equipment, the proximity fuse, the DUKW, the jeep, yet still ask their armies to join battle against the Wehrmacht equipped with a range of tanks utterly inferior in armour and killing power? A British tank officer, newly-arrived in France in June 1944, recorded a conversation with his regimental adjutant about the state of the armoured battle:

  ‘What do the Germans have most of?’

  ‘Panthers. The Panther can slice through a Churchill like butter from a mile away.’

  ‘And how does a Churchill get a Panther?’

  ‘It creeps up on it. When it reaches close quarters the gunner tries to bounce a shot off the underside of the Panther’s gun mantlet. If he’s lucky, it goes through a piece of thin armour above the driver’s head.’

  ‘Has anybody ever done it?’

  ‘Yes. Davis in C Squadron. He’s back with headquarters now, trying to recover his nerve.’

  ‘How does a Churchill get a Tiger?’

  ‘It’s supposed to get within two hundred yards and put a shot through the periscope.’

  ‘Has anyone ever done it?’

  ‘No.’

  The Sherman tank was the principal armoured weapon of the Allied armies, magnificently reliable and mechanically efficient, but critically handicapped by thin armour and lack of an adequate gun, save for the few British 17-pounder-mounted Sherman Fireflies. The Sherman weighed 32 tons and could move at 24 mph. It carried only 76 mm of frontal armour, 51 mm of side armour. The Mk V 75 mm gun with which most models were equipped could penetrate 74 mm of armour at 100 yards, 68 mm at 500 yards, 60 mm at 1,000 yards. Even the upgunned 76 mm and 17-pounder versions suffered problems from the fierce flash when they fired, making it difficult for the crews to observe fall of shot. Note the white star painted on the turret side, the universal identification symbol for all Allied vehicles in Europe.

  If this account6 bordered upon satire, the reality was little different – the product of an extraordinary lack of Allied foresight. A specialist who was intimately concerned in the British tank design programme from its earliest days, Colonel George Macleod Ross, suggested after the war that the War Office made a fatal error by separating the development of fighting vehicles from that of tank guns. Ross, and other experts, argued that it was vital to design the right tank gun, and then to build a suitable vehicle to carry it. Instead, throughout the Second World War, a succession of British tanks were produced in isolation from any consideration either of the enemy gun that they must expect to meet, or of the weight of armour that their own gun must expect to penetrate. Tank design was located at Chobham, while gun design was sited at Woolwich. Although the design of the superb British 17-pounder gun was approved and a prototype constructed in June 1941, it was not mounted in a tank until the first Sherman Firefly was belatedly produced in August 1943, in too small a quantity to influence OVERLORD decisively. ‘It is not unfair to say,’ declared Ross, who served for much of the war as British Technical Liaison officer to the US Army Ordnance in Detroit, ‘that little of the labour and materials expended on the 25,000 British-built tanks helped to win the war.’7 A visit to Eighth Army in the desert by a temporary technical observer in November 1942 resulted in a disastrous report to the War Office, allegedly approved by Montgomery, asserting that ‘the 75 mm gun is all we require’.8 This report set the seal upon British tank gun policy for much of the rest of the war, ensuring that 6-pounder and 75 mm-gunned Churchills and Cromwells would form the basis of British tank strength. ‘None of our authorities seemed to understand as the Germans did’, wrote Ross, ‘the need in war for sustained improvement of weapons.’9

  Yet the decisive force in wartime tank production, as in so much else, was the United States. Russell Weigley, an outstanding American analyst of the US army in the war, has highlighted the failure of its architects to match their end – the application of concentrated power upon the battlefield – to their means: principally, the Sherman tank. Against 24,630 tanks built by the Germans and 24,843 made by the British by the end of 1944, the Americans turned out a staggering 88,410, 25,600 of which were supplied to the British. The great majority were Shermans, first produced in 1942, and dominating all Allied armoured operations in 1944–45. Two-thirds of the tanks employed by British units in Normandy were Shermans, the balance being chiefly Cromwells (7th Armoured Division) and Churchills (79th Division and independent armoured brigades). The Sherman was a superbly reliable piece of machinery, far easier to maintain and with a track life five times longer than its German counterparts. It weighed 33 tons, compared with the 43 tons of the Panther, and 56 tons of the Tiger. Its fast cross-country speed reflected the Americans’ doctrinal obsession with pace in armoured operations. It possessed two important advantages over its German opponents: a faster speed of turret traverse to engage the enemy, and a higher rate of fire. Conversely, it suffered two critical weaknesses: first, its readiness to catch fire, which caused soldiers on the battlefield to christen it ‘the ronson’ or ‘tommy cooker’. This was a reflection upon its design and thin armour, rather than (as the US War Department suggested tetchily after early complaints) because its crews were loading too much ammunition into its turret. Second, and more important, it was undergunned. Its original 75 mm gu
n produced a muzzle velocity of 2,050 feet-per-second against 2,900 f.p.s. of the British 17-pounder and the 3,340 f.p.s. of the German 88 mm. At a range of 200 yards, the British gun had almost thrice the penetration of the 75 mm. A Tiger could knock out a Sherman at a range of 4,000 yards, while the American tank could not penetrate a Tiger’s frontal armour at all. Even when the Sherman was upgunned with a 76 mm, it was compelled to close to within 300 yards of a Tiger to have a chance of knocking it out. ‘Not only do German Mk V and Mk VI tanks keep out a greater proportion of hits than Shermans,’ concluded a gloomy SHAEF Operational Research report in 1944, ‘but also they are far less likely to brew up when penetrated’ (emphasis in original).10 Even the much lighter 25-ton German Mk IV tank, which made up about half the tank strength of the panzer divisions, packed a KWK 40 75 mm gun with a muzzle velocity 20 per cent greater than the Sherman’s 75 mm. This was capable of penetrating 92 mm of armour at 500 yards against the 68 mm of the Sherman’s gun.