Overlord (Pan Military Classics)

by Hastings, Max

  Yet Dwight Eisenhower was the Supreme Commander of the Allied armies, upon whom hung the fervent hopes of two governments for the unity and triumph of their armies. His charm and statesmanship deeply impressed, even moved, all those who worked closely with him. Montgomery’s inability to establish a personal relationship with the American, to confide to Eisenhower his own private hopes and fears for the battle, cost him dear. 21st Army Group’s Commander-in-Chief made the immense error of believing that the Supreme Commander could be side-stepped, deluded, soft-talked into leaving himself, Montgomery, the supreme professional, to fight the war. He might indeed have been successful in this had his armies on the battlefield fulfilled his early hopes in Normandy. But when they did not, it was Eisenhower, fretting impotent in England, who bore the impatience of the American press, the doubts and fears of the politicians, the charges of failure of generalship which the ignorant associated with himself. Eisenhower might have been willing to ride passively upon a tide of success created by Montgomery. He was quite unwilling idly to accept responsibility for apparent failure and stagnation. At the time and for some years after the war, the extent of the breakdown of relations between Montgomery and Eisenhower was concealed. Today there is no doubt that by late July 1944, the American was weary to death of his ground-force commander.

  Brooke urgently warned Montgomery on 19 July to drop his objections to a prime-ministerial visit to Normandy, and use the opportunity to rebuild a little of Churchill’s flagging faith. The CIGS warned his friend ‘of the tendency of the PM to listen to suggestions that Monty played for safety and was not prepared to take risks’. Brooke wrote in his diary:

  Winston had never been very fond of Monty; when things went well he put up with him, when they did not he at once became ‘your Monty’. Just at this time Eisenhower had been expressing displeasure and accusing Monty of being sticky, of not pushing sufficiently on the Caen front with the British while he made the Americans do the attacking on the right. Winston was inclined to listen to these complaints.18

  Brigadier Richardson said that ‘in strategic terms, things were going according to plan. In tactical terms, they were not.’ It is much easier to understand the criticisms made of Montgomery by the Americans than those made by his fellow countrymen. Until the very end of the war, the British demanded that they should be treated as equal partners in the alliance with the United States, and vied for a lion’s share of Allied command positions. They could scarcely be surprised if the Americans showed resentment when the British flinched before heavy casualties, and fought on the eastern flank with less apparent determination and will for sacrifice than the American army in the west. Whatever the Americans’ weaknesses of command and tactics, their willingness to expend men to gain an objective was never in doubt. ‘On the whole, they were prepared to go at it more toughly than we were,’ said Brigadier Carver of 4th Armoured Brigade.19

  Montgomery, however, was never allowed to forget that he was charged with responsibility for Britain’s last great army, her final reserves of manpower in a struggle that had drained these to the limit. With the constant admonitions reaching him from England about casualties, he would have faced bitter criticism – from Churchill as much as any man – had losses risen steeply. It is indisputable that this knowledge bore hard upon the British conduct of operations in Normandy, from the summit to the base of the command structure. Butcher wrote on 24 July, after visiting Southwick House for an hour when Eisenhower drove there to see de Guingand:

  Bill Culver, de Guingand’s American aide, in response to my pointed question as to what really stopped Monty’s attack, said he felt that Monty, his British Army commander Dempsey, the British corps commanders and even those of the divisions are so conscious of Britain’s ebbing manpower that they hesitate to commit an attack where a division may be lost. When it’s lost, it’s done and finished . . . The Commanders feel the blood of the British Empire, and hence its future, are too precious for dash in battle.20

  With hindsight it may be easy to suggest that a more ruthless determination to break through on the British front earlier in the campaign would, in the end, have cost fewer lives. Tedder’s allegation that Second Army was not trying hard enough had some foundation, but it was much easier to take this sanguine view from the distance of SHAEF – or from the perspective of history – than for Montgomery and his commanders in Normandy, who had to watch their precious army take persistent punishment. Tedder’s attitude proved his claim to be an outstanding Alliance commander, with a truly Anglo-American perspective, but it showed little sympathy for valid if more parochial British sensitivities. If the British army was to achieve major ground gains on the eastern flank against the powerful German forces deployed before it, the evidence suggested that the cost would be terrible.

  Montgomery is entitled to the gratitude of his country, as well as of his soldiers, for declining to yield to the temptation to mount a ruthlessly costly attack merely to stave off the political demands made upon him. He judged, correctly, that if the Allies persisted with their existing plan for pressure in the east and breakthrough in the west, the Germans would eventually crack without a British bloodbath. Yet in July as in June, he denied himself the goodwill of either American or British sceptics by creating a smokescreen of distortion and untruth to conceal his disappointment with the failure of Second Army to gain ground at acceptable cost. It is a measure of the criticism now directed against him, and of the political pressure within the Alliance, that as late as 28 July, when the American breakout was already making good progress, Brooke was writing to him:

  Now, as a result of all this talking and the actual situation on your front, I feel personally quite certain that Dempsey must attack at the earliest possible moment [emphasis in original] on a large scale. We must not allow German forces to move from his front to Bradley’s front or we shall give more cause than ever for criticism.21

  It is impossible to imagine that Montgomery could have been sacked – whatever Tedder’s delusion on that count – without inflicting an intolerable blow to British national confidence. He whom propaganda has made mighty, no man may readily cast aside, as Portal was compelled to acknowledge a few months later in his difficulties with ‘Bomber’ Harris. But it is difficult to guess what new pressures and directives might have been forced upon the Commander-in-Chief of 21st Army Group had not the perspective of the Normandy campaign now been entirely transformed by the American Operation COBRA.

  9 » THE BREAKOUT

  COBRA

  Throughout the first half of July, while the British and Canadians were fighting their bitter battles around Caen, the Americans were enduring equal pain and frustration in their efforts to disentangle themselves from the clinging misery of the bocage. On 3 July, Middleton’s VIII Corps attacked south towards Coutances–St Lô–Caumont. The corps commander himself was one of the most experienced fighting soldiers in the American army, having led a regiment in France in the First World War, and more recently a division in Italy. But Middleton was now seriously troubled and weakened by the pain of an arthritic knee, and his staff were conscious that this reduced his ability to concentrate upon the battle. Not that it was likely that the outcome of the early fighting would have been different had he been fit. By far the toughest initial objective was the 300-foot height of Mont Castre, dominating the Cotentin plain. After heavy fighting the superb 82nd Airborne Division, halved in strength by weeks in action, gained the hill and proved what a first-class formation could achieve even against dogged opposition. Elsewhere on the front, however, matters went much less happily. The accident-prone 90th Division made no headway, and Bradley prepared to sack yet another of its commanders, Landrum. The 79th Division suffered 2,000 casualties in the next five days to crawl forward a little over three miles. There was nothing to suggest that these difficulties were caused by command shortcomings, for when VII Corps joined the attack on 4 July under the dynamic Collins, they too found themselves rapidly bogged down. On the 7th, XIX Corps wa
s thrown in, although Corlett, its corps commander, like Middleton was in visibly poor health, and even when fit had never been considered a driver of men. Hodges described him at the time as possessing ‘that hospital look’.1 Scenes of near-farce ensued when advancing elements of 30th Division became entangled with the tanks of 3rd Armored, creating terrible congestion. There was a furious confrontation between Generals Bohn and Hobbs about whose fault this was, which ended in the sacking of Bohn, the junior officer, but a tough old veteran who had started as a private soldier and risen through the ranks of the American army.

  After 12 days of battle, VIII Corps had suffered 10,000 casualties to advance some seven miles. Corlett’s and Collins’s men had fared no better. ‘Thus my breakout and dreams of a blitz to Avranches failed badly,’ wrote Bradley, ‘a crushing disappointment to me personally.’2 The principal American achievement was the defeat of a counter-attack by Panzer Lehr towards St Jean-de-Daye on 11 July, which 9th and 30th Divisions threw back causing the loss of 25 per cent of the Germans’ strength. Once again, it had been demonstrated that movement by either army was the crucial difficulty in the bocage, and that in defence American troops could hammer the Germans as hard as Hausser’s men of Seventh Army had hit the Americans when they were defending.

  Enduring the pain of their own difficulties, the Americans sometimes forgot the scale of suffering that they were inflicting upon the Germans. Sergeant Helmut Gunther, of 17th Panzer-grenadiers, each day watched his company of the reconnaissance battalion whittled away without hope of replacements: Hahnel, who was killed by small-arms fire in their first battle; Heinrich, his veteran chess partner, who died on the Carentan road; Dobler, who took over a platoon when its commander was killed and was shot in the head as he jumped from the ditch to lead a counter-attack. All these old friends and many more were gone: ‘I used to think – “What a poor pig I am, fighting here with my back to the wall.” ’3 Yet Gunther’s self-pity was mixed with astonishment that the survivors stood the strain and the losses so well, and fought on. He was astounded that the Americans did not break through their line in early July. His own company was reduced to 20 men out of 120, yet when he sought his CO’s permission to withdraw 50 yards to a better tactical position, it was refused.

  On 9 July, they were at last driven from their positions, and Gunther found himself staring at a Sherman tank bearing down upon him only yards away. He was working forward to throw a sticky bomb at it when a German voice called ‘Come back!’, and he glanced round to see a German tank behind him. He stood confused and uncertain for a moment as the panzer commander shouted, ‘Get down, he’s going to shoot!’ and a shell from the Sherman blasted into the German tank, splinters ricocheting into Gunther’s back. Characteristically, the panzer survived the encounter. The Sherman did not. Gunther was evacuated to hospital.

  The defeat of the German counter-attacks was encouraging to the Americans, but provided little consolation for Bradley, wrestling with his fundamental problem of breaking through into Brittany. At the highest level, the Americans discussed with deep concern the problem of giving their infantry divisions something of the thrust and attacking power that so far seemed the monopoly of the Airborne. ‘We were flabbergasted by the bocage,’ said General Quesada of IXth Tactical Air Command, who was working daily alongside Bradley. ‘Our infantry had become paralysed. It has never been adequately described how immobilized they were by the sound of small-arms fire among the hedges.’4 Patton reminded an old French army friend of a remark that he had made in the First War: ‘He had said, “The poorer the infantry the more artillery it needs; the American infantry needs all it can get.” He was right then, and still is.’5 First Army reported on ‘the urgent need for the development of an aggressive spirit by the infantry soldier . . . The outstanding impression gained from a review of battle experience is the importance of aggressive action and continuous energetic forward movement in order to gain ground and reduce casualties.’6

  It had become brutally apparent to every man in First Army that service in an infantry unit was an almost certain sentence to death or wounds. The top sergeant in Corporal George Small’s anti-aircraft battalion routinely threatened jesters: ‘One more crack like that and you’ll find yourself in the infantry.’7 The unfortunate 90th Division suffered replacement of 150 per cent of its officers and over 100 per cent of enlisted men in its first six weeks in action. Typical tank casualty figures showed that in June alone, the 712th Battalion lost 21 out of 74 in 16 days of action, the 746th 44 out of 51 in 23 days, the 747th 41 out of 61 in 10 days. In July, the 712th lost 21 out of 68 in 16 days, the 756th 51 out of 91 in 29 days. Temporary or permanent losses from ‘battle fatigue’ had reached an alarming 10,000 men since D-Day, around 20 per cent of all casualties. Between June and November 1944, a staggering 26 per cent of all American soldiers in combat divisions were treated for some form of battle fatigue; this was out of a total of 929,307 such cases in the US Army in the Second World War. There was a real fear that ‘battle fatigue’ was reaching epidemic proportions. The after-action medical report of First Army declared that:

  . . . the rate of admission to the exhaustion centres . . . during the first weeks of operations was in accord with the estimates made previously, however, the rate thereafter increased to such proportions that it became necessary to reinforce each of the platoons operating the exhaustion centres . . . Reasons for this increase: a) addition of a number of divisions to the army in excess of original estimates, b) difficult terrain, mud, hedgerows etc, c) stiff resistance offered by the enemy in the La Haye du Puits, Carentan and St. Lô actions, d) troops remaining in combat for long periods.8

  Every army in the Second World War recognized battle exhaustion or shell shock as a genuine, curable condition among soldiers under acute strain. But it was felt by many officers in 1944 that the US Army had become too ready to allow its men to believe that battle exhaustion was an acceptable state. There is a narrow borderline between humanitarian concern and dangerous weakness. If Patton had been overharsh in his treatment of battle exhaustion in Sicily, there seemed grounds for believing that in Normandy, First Army moved too far in the opposite direction. Major Frank Colacicco of the 3rd/18th Infantry described how men appeared before him claiming battle fatigue and, if challenged, defied him to court-martial them. ‘What was five years in the brig? They knew that the US government would fluke out.’ By July, the rear areas of all the Allied armies were generously populated with deserters, whom American units often treated with much greater forbearance than the British. Provost-Sergeant James Dobie of the British 5th King’s Regiment was astonished to discover, when he returned two errant GIs to their unit, that ‘they were greeted like long-lost brothers instead of absentees’. The German army’s discipline was not based entirely upon natural loyalty. Between January and September 1944, the Wehrmacht executed almost 4,000 of its own men, 1,605 of these for desertion.

  Some senior Americans regretted that their army had failed to adopt Montgomery’s policy before D-day, of leavening untried divisions with key officers and NCOs who possessed battle experience at battalion level and below. There had also been a failure to make the men of First Army familiar with their leaders. An extraordinary number of American soldiers who fought in north-west Europe regarded the high command as impossibly remote, and Eisenhower and Bradley as hardly comprehensible figures. A few divisional commanders – Huebner, Cota, Barton, Rose, Eddy – became widely known and respected by their men. But the roll call of senior American officers found wanting and sacked in Normandy was astonishing: two successive commanders of 90th Division, Brown of 28th Division, McMahon of 8th (who told Bradley frankly, ‘Brad, I think you are going to have to relieve me.’),9 Watson of 3rd Armored, to name only the most prominent. Bradley found 83rd Division’s leadership ‘uncertain’, and that of the 79th and 80th suspect. Of the corps commanders, only Collins had distinguished himself. The commander-designate of First Army, Courtney Hodges, was considered by most of his peers to b
e an officer of limited imagination and self-effacing personality. Bradley described him as ‘one of the most skilled craftsmen under my entire command’, but was constrained to add that he was also ‘essentially a military technician . . . a spare, soft-voiced Georgian without temper, drama, or visible emotion.’10

  If Bradley’s personal modesty was one of his most engaging characteristics, it contributed to the impersonality of his army. Whatever men thought of Patton – and many scorned him – all of them knew who he was. Most took a pride, then and later, in serving with Patton’s Army. As Montgomery understood so well, the cult of personality can be immensely valuable in war. The lack of it within the American army in Normandy – the difficulty for most infantry replacements of identifying with a man, a unit, anything human beyond their own squad save the vast juggernaut of tanks and guns with which they rolled – contributed significantly to the difficulties of the American army. Where the German army did its utmost to maintain men in regional formations, the Americans pursued a deliberate policy of dividing men from the same town or state – a legacy of the First War, when the pain of a local unit’s destruction was thought to have borne too heavily upon individual communities. But even industrialized war on a vast scale needs its focus of identity, its charismatic leaders. These were instinctive human necessities that America’s commanders seemed slow to understand.