The Allies

by Winston Groom

  He continued to brood about the Normandy invasion, always returning to the possibility of failure and what that would mean. Aside from a great loss of life and treasure, it would be a great propaganda weapon for the Germans and a ghastly morale killer for the Allies. Blame would have to be assessed, which would lead to more low morale. There was a good likelihood that the Americans would pull out and devote their efforts to the Pacific. What would happen in Italy would be anybody’s guess. Could the Russians alone beat Hitler? If so, what would the world look like then?7

  Churchill also worried over his party’s losses in recent elections. The war was wearing on everyone—the food, clothing, and gasoline rationing—and it had been going on five years now. Labor unions were threatening strikes. All the young men were in the military. The Germans still managed to send over the occasional bombing raid. People’s nerves were jangled. Inside a lavatory, one of Churchill’s friends saw a graffiti message scrawled above a mirror: “Winston Churchill Is a Bastard.”8

  These daunting issues wore on a man of Churchill’s age. He was at present not only prime minister but minister of defense and foreign minister, at least temporarily, in place of an exhausted Anthony Eden. Everyone associated with Churchill seemed to keep a diary—and almost to a one they agreed that he looked “tired,” “aged ten years,” “memory was unclear,” “perfectly exhausted.” But he just kept running, like an aged racehorse, because he didn’t know what else to do. A vacation was out of the question.

  In March one of the ministers with knowledge of Tube Alloys—the British name for the atomic bomb project—told Churchill that the matter should be presented to the entire war cabinet, and to the Soviets as well. Churchill thought otherwise. Of the war cabinet he responded, “What can they do about it?” And as far as the Russians went: “Absolutely not.”9

  As D-day for Overlord approached, Churchill began to immerse himself in the invasion plans. General Montgomery had told him he needed far more men on the initial landings, and Churchill went to Eisenhower about it. There arose a controversy over the bombing of French railroad junctions prior to the landings that would thwart the Germans bringing reinforcements to the beachhead. The problem was that the rail junctions were invariably located in French towns and cities; the loss of life for civilians would be horrendous. Churchill felt such slaughter was hard to justify, but the Americans felt otherwise. Finally it was left to Roosevelt to break the impasse, and he did not stoop to scruples. If destroying the rail junctions would help the invasion, then it must be done.

  Lastly, Churchill concocted a wild plan to get to the Normandy beaches for a “tour of inspection” on D-day. He succeeded in getting a navy admiral to write up an order with Churchill boarding the cruiser Belfast, which would take him to Normandy. There he would debark on a destroyer, which could get him in closer for a visual inspection of conditions on the beaches. This scheme set into motion a general kerfuffle that would lead straight to Buckingham Palace.

  The admiral, Sir Bertram Ramsay, told Churchill that he had respected his wish to keep the matter from the first sea lord but had thought it necessary to inform General Eisenhower, who was in charge of the invasion. This created an uproar in both camps when Eisenhower, who was very much against the idea, immediately informed the British, whose higher ranks were also fiercely opposed to it. Churchill’s military adviser General Ismay “rather cleverly made the point that the problem was not so much safety, but being cut off from communications during a short period when crucial decisions might be necessary.” Churchill replied that if Ismay remained opposed to him making the trip he would take him along!

  At length it was left to King George to deal with the issue. He solved it by threatening to come along as well, a risk that Churchill felt he could not allow. So instead of being aboard a cruiser the night before D-day, Churchill “spent the night like a gentleman in England now abed.” He left Clementine with the morbid comment, “Do you realize that by the time you wake up in the morning twenty thousand men may have been killed?”

  * * *

  IN THE MISTY FALSE DAWN of June 6, 1944, German lookouts all along an eighty-mile stretch of coastline in Normandy, France, were staggered to behold an armada of thousands of ships looming in the English Channel, two hundred miles to the south of where the Germans had been expecting them. Soon, naval gunfire from destroyers, cruisers, and battleships began blasting German defenses and installations along what Hitler called his “Atlantic Wall,” while hundreds of landing craft headed toward the beaches. The night before, the American 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions and a British airborne division had dropped behind German lines to create confusion and panic. By afternoon more than a hundred and sixty thousand Allied soldiers of Omar Bradley’s American First Army and Bernard Montgomery’s British 21st Army Group would be on the Normandy beaches. Overlord had arrived.

  There were a great many ruses used to fool the Germans as to when and where the invasion would take place. One, known as the Man Who Never Was (aka Operation Mincemeat), involved floating a corpse dressed in an officer’s uniform, shackled to a secret messages briefcase, which washed up on a Mediterranean beach and was immediately examined by the Germans. The briefcase contained a top secret message indicating that the Allied landings would be in the Mediterranean. Another ruse involved an army that never was, commanded by General George S. Patton in the south of England. It consisted of thousands upon thousands of tanks and trucks, artillery pieces, sleeping tents, and lots of radio traffic. The tanks, trucks, guns, and sleeping tents were life-size balloons to trick German reconnaissance intelligence into thinking that this phony “army” was intended to land at the Pas de Calais, France’s closest point with England. And fooled the Germans were.

  An even more elaborate ruse involved the RAF and its use of Window—the little strips of tinfoil used to confuse enemy radar. For hours before the landings, British planes in continuous columns bombarded the Germanheld shores with tons of the stuff, which muddled their radar while seven thousand Allied ships approached the Normandy coast undetected.

  Simultaneously, throughout France another Allied army rose up to torment the German foe. These were the underground fighters of the French Resistance, or Maquis, who on signal began derailing trains, attacking German convoys, puncturing tires, blowing bridges, throwing bombs, and otherwise disrupting the German occupying forces.

  By late afternoon the Allies had taken most of their objectives and were holding a defensive line several miles inland from the Channel. About ten thousand casualties had been suffered, with about half of them killed in action. Also, some ten thousand French citizens died when the Allies bombed the rail junctions. Within two months nearly 2 million Allied troops—American, British, French, Polish, and others—would be ashore.

  Thwarted in his desire to go in with the men on D-day, Churchill nevertheless arranged to visit the battle area less than a week later. He did this in conjunction with the American chiefs of staff, who had decided to fly to England the day after the landings to be on hand if anything went wrong (and, one suspects, to get a look at the greatest of all invasions: the one they had planned over, argued over, sweated over, and often anguished over, which would anticipate the liberation of Europe and the end of the war).

  Churchill took George Marshall and the heads of the U.S. Army, Navy, and the Air Corps into his private train, feting them with an elaborate banquet and many toasts of fine champagne as the train slowly wound its way to Portsmouth and the embarkation point. They were greeted there by a glowing Eisenhower, and then split up for the voyage to the battle area: the Americans in the USS Thompson and the British in a Royal Navy destroyer that would take them to the coast of Normandy.

  Once on French soil, the distinguished American visitors were greeted by the U.S. Army commander Omar Bradley. It was Marshall’s first visit to France since he had fought there twenty-six years earlier during World War I. From the beaches the party moved inla
nd past a sobering temporary cemetery where at least a portion of the several thousand American servicemen killed in action had been lain.

  It was hot and dusty, and the roads were overflowing with American soldiers, German prisoners, trucks, tanks, jeeps, guns, and ambulances filled with the wounded and the dead. Bradley suddenly realized, as he put it later, “the catastrophe that a single German sniper could cause.” He took everyone to his headquarters in an old apple orchard, where they lunched al fresco on C rations washed down with water in tin canteen cups.10

  For his part, Churchill entered France in a pugnacious frame of mind. He seemed delighted at the frenzied invasion activity: German bombers coming and going, British antiaircraft guns blasting, men marching, tanks clanking, people hollering. He rode happily in the rear of Montgomery’s open jeep, pink-faced and waving a cigar and his famous V for victory sign to passing troops. On the way back to the destroyer to return to Portsmouth, they passed a large monitor warship firing its big 14-inch guns at the Germans. Churchill insisted on climbing aboard, saying he’d “never been on one of his Majesty’s ships engaging the enemy.” But the rough weather would have made the transfer too risky and there the matter ended—almost.11 Still, when boarding his destroyer Churchill persuaded the ship’s batteries to begin blasting away at some target beyond the beachhead, “to take a plug ourselves,” he said. “Winston wanted to take part in the war, and was longing for some kind of retaliation [from the Germans],” General Alan Brooke surmised in his diary, but they refused to engage in the exchange.12

  Brooke was astonished at “how little [France] had been affected by the German occupation and five years of war.” The crops were good, the farms neat, and there were plenty of fat livestock, he said, adding grimly that the French population “did not seem in any way pleased to see us arrive to liberate France. They had been quite content as they were, and we were bringing war and desolation to their country.”13

  * * *

  THE NIGHT OF CHURCHILL’S RETURN to London coincided with the arrival in the city of Hitler’s new top secret weapon with which he believed he would win the war: a pilotless rocket, or “flying bomb” (or, as the military called it, V-1). Londoners called them “buzz bombs” for the queer buzzing sound they made with their pulse-jet-propelled engine. They were equipped with a rudimentary gyroscope that was supposed to keep them straight and level across the Channel, where they were designed to fall indiscriminately on greater London. Most of this first batch went far off course. But several did in fact reach London and killed half a dozen people.

  Hitler and his propagandists had been hinting about such secret weapons of “retaliation” for more than a year, and Churchill had requested that his staff prepare for them. After that first day’s inconclusive raid, suddenly there were hundreds of the flying bombs in any given twenty-four-hour period. “The blind, impersonal nature of the missile made the individual on the ground feel helpless,” Churchill wrote. There was little that he could do, no human enemy that he could see shot down.

  The following Sunday, one of the things fell on the Guards Chapel, killing two hundred guardsmen and demolishing the building. The RAF souped up and stripped down some of its Spitfires, which could sometimes overtake the weapon and shoot it down—or, in some cases, get close enough to nudge it and throw it off course. It was possible to shoot down the device with antiaircraft guns as well, but this did little good because nearly all the antiaircraft guns were in and around London, and the thing exploded on contact with the ground anyway.

  The British also made a point of bombing the launching sites, but the Germans made new ones and kept up the raids. Then intelligence reports came back that the Germans were storing the things in caves outside Paris. These were bombed mercilessly and several thousand missiles were destroyed. But the Germans had more where those came from, built by slave labor. One landed on a building housing twenty-two homeless children and their caretakers; none survived. It was simply another thing to be endured, and people more or less got used to it. Within a month nearly three thousand Londoners had been killed and ten thousand injured by the flying bombs.14

  At length, the British decided to move all the antiaircraft guns in London to the coast in hopes of shooting down the missiles as they came ashore. This was an enormous undertaking, moving six hundred huge Bofors guns weighing up to 10,000 pounds each along with tens of thousands of gun crews—including Mary Churchill. But between this tactic and the air-to-air destruction by British Spitfires, Churchill declared in September that “the V-1 had been mastered.”15

  Then came the V-2.

  The Germans had also been working on a rocket-propelled ballistic missile, tall as a five-story building, with a nearly 2,500-pound warhead. This was a far more serious threat. Its trajectory took it fifty miles into space, and with a speed of 3,500 mph it was impossible to shoot down with guns or planes. Its engine cut out right before it reached London, so it was also impossible to hear it coming and take cover. Its explosion could erase a city block. The rockets began falling on September 8, 1944, and continued until near the end of the war, when the Allies pushed the Germans beyond the V-2’s two-hundred-plus-mile range. Londoners felt quite helpless and frustrated. Churchill admitted, “We could do little against the rocket once it was launched.” On a snowbound New Year’s Day, 1945, Jock Colville told his diary, “The rockets are falling like autumn leaves.”

  The RAF strenuously bombed launching sites and the manufacturing facilities at Peenemunde, deep into Germany, but at a terrible cost: some fourteen thousand airmen were killed or missing on anti-V-2 missions.16 The rockets fell at a rate of fifteen to twenty a day, around the clock. Before it was over tens of thousands of Londoners were killed or injured and thousands of homes were destroyed.

  Meantime, the British and American air forces had just about given up on limiting their bombing to military targets and were quickly reducing more German cities, Berlin included, to piles of brick dust and sad heaps of debris.

  * * *

  NEARLY TWO MONTHS AFTER the D-day landings, the Allies were still holding their slender beachhead in Normandy. There was daily fighting along the front lines, but the situation had reached a stalemate. That part of Normandy was bocage country: farmland divided by thick hedgerows designed to resist soil erosion. Each hedgerow contained a potential trap for enemy machine guns or antitank weapons. The Allies thought it was too dangerous to break out, and the Germans thought it was too dangerous to break in. Then the U.S. Third Army got cranked up, with General George Patton at its helm.

  Finally Eisenhower and his generals settled on Operation Cobra to bust out of Normandy and get into the open country. Patton’s army led the way, exclaiming, “Let’s cut the guts out of these Krauts and get on to Berlin,” adding with a flourish, “And when we get to Berlin, I am personally going to shoot that paper-hanging son of a bitch!”*

  On July 25, 1944, the Allies began the big push with First Army in Normandy, breaking through the German lines by the second day. Patton immediately ordered two armored divisions through the break and began moving so fast he ran himself off the maps. Ike had to slow him down to keep continuity in the line.

  Hitler continued to aid the Allies by insisting on directing the battle from his comfortable aerie high in the Bavarian Alps. He had fired Erwin Rommel for letting the Allies get ashore and replaced him with Field Marshal Günther von Kluge (who, unbeknownst to Hitler, had been involved in the July plot to kill him). Hitler kept ordering costly counterattacks that were quickly chewing up Kluge’s command. When Kluge complained, Hitler ordered him back to Berlin; fearful that the Gestapo had learned of his involvement in the bomb plot against the Führer, Kluge committed suicide by swallowing a cyanide capsule. Rommel later did the same, given a choice by the Gestapo between suicide and a war hero’s funeral or execution.

  Hitler sent Field Marshal Walter Model to replace Kluge, but Model’s report was devastating: withdraw
the army immediately or lose it. Thus the Germans began a long, fighting retreat into Germany, with the Allies right behind. German troops left Paris fairly quickly, and quietly, chased by an uprising of French Resistance fighters. German commanders had refused Hitler’s orders to destroy the city.

  Churchill, meanwhile, had failed to persuade Eisenhower to scrap Operation Anvil in favor of an immediate Allied push up the Adriatic into the Balkans and Austria. On September 12, 1944, he went to a conference in Quebec, where he hoped to persuade Roosevelt to adopt the plan. Churchill warned him of what would happen if the Soviet army got to the Balkan states before the Allies: communism and more communism. Roosevelt was unmoved. Churchill reported that Roosevelt looked “frail.”17

  Churchill was certain now that Stalin intended to expand the Soviet empire wherever he could project power. The prime minister had expected as much from the start, though at first he’d been tempted to believe Stalin when the premier promised he had no designs on European lands. That had simply been a lie. With Stalin’s armies there would come new commissars to organize new government employees, who would put in place the brutalized systems that would last for people’s lifetimes—and, so far as Churchill knew, forever.

  The Soviets, Churchill now believed, would take over Romania and Bulgaria and the Baltic countries, then Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Austria, and perhaps Germany itself. Having grabbed all that, and killed the system of capitalist trade, the rest of Europe was likewise in danger. And who knew, Churchill worried, if Turkey and the whole of the Middle East would be left for the Communists to pick off one state at a time?