Divided on D-Day

by Edward E. Gordon

  Progress became a measure of yards rather than miles. Middleton's troops averaged only a thousand yards a day during the next two weeks while suffering ten thousand casualties. On July 14 an unnerved Bradley ordered Middleton and Collins to halt their drive. Corlett continued toward St. Lo, originally a June 11 objective. Corlett took St. Lo on July 18 but at a cost of another five thousand men.8

  Bradley's breakout only moved the Allied line about seven miles at a cost of forty thousand battle casualties. The crack Panzer Lehr Division was particularly key in adding to the staggering US casualties. Moreover, the combat effectiveness of another ten thousand men was impaired by battle fatigue. Bradley's great July offensive had fizzled out as an unstainable slaughter at a cost of seven thousand GIs per mile.9

  The high casualties triggered a feeling of despair among the troops who participated. Hedgerow warfare was physically very confining. It seemed to isolate the small combat teams from each other, thus leaving them with the feeling that they were on their own. Some of the divisions fighting here were largely newly arrived inexperienced troops. They had not been given any special training to fight in a hedgerow maze and were experiencing the difficult transition from training to combat.

  Morgan's original COSSAC plan had the Normandy breakout targeted from Caen southward because tanks could better maneuver on the flat Falaise plain. This would have given the Allies the upper hand in a war of maneuver. Instead the offensives in the St. Lo area, where the bocage was at its worst, forced the unprepared Americans into brutal combat that resembled jungle warfare.

  Charles Bonesteel, a US topographical staff officer, repeatedly warned Montgomery that the Americans could not achieve a breakout without huge casualties. Bonesteel proved correct regarding the casualties, and the breakout did not come quickly. Meanwhile Montgomery ignored the bloodletting and stuck to his “plan,” launching only a series of diversionary attacks around Caen.10

  MONTGOMERY'S OPERATION CHARNWOOD: TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE

  On July 7 Montgomery mounted another effort to capture Caen—Operation CHARNWOOD. It began with a major air strike by 460 British heavy bombers dropping over 2,600 tons of bombs.11 Using the strategic bomber force that previously had concentrated only on the enemy's war-supporting infrastructure (railroads, refineries, factories, etc.) was an unorthodox technique. The air force barons, Air Chief Marshal Arthur Harris of British Bomber Command and Lieutenant General Carl A. Spaatz of the US Strategic Air Force, strenuously resisted this shift to a tactical target. As previously mentioned, bad relations between Montgomery and Eisenhower and the air chiefs persisted throughout the entire Overlord operation. Both Eisenhower and Churchill finally had to personally intervene and insist that the temporary use of these bombers was absolutely necessary for this renewed offensive.

  The massive air bombardment of Caen was followed by two days of bitter fighting by 115,000 men of the British Third, Highland Fifty-First, and Canadian Third Divisions. But Operation CHARNWOOD was only a partial success. It took only the northern half of Caen reaching the banks of the Orne River where it divides the city at a cost of eighty tanks and over 3,500 casualties.12 (See Map 14.)

  The capture of the northern half of the city was more symbolic than useful. Caen itself was dominated by the heights of the Bourguébus Ridge, located about four miles to the southeast. In Caen's eastern suburb of Cormelles, German observers perched in the tall towers of an immense steelworks could still spot all British movements below.

  The British did take the Carpiquet airfield and reached the banks of the Orne and Odon, but it was too little, too late. The key to the OVERLORD plan was the rapid capture of the city of Caen or its bypass by an Allied offensive. CHARNWOOD gained little territory. Montgomery failed to provide even enough ground to deploy the bulk of the First Canadian Army still waiting across the channel in England.13

  MONTY'S MIND GAMES

  By early July a din of criticism rose from other commanders, the press, and politicians over the lack of progress on the ground in Normandy. Disbelief mounted because of the disparity between what the map showed and what Montgomery claimed. The critical question remained, what Allied strategy would regain the ground initiative and propel their armies across France into Germany?

  While this storm gathered around Montgomery, he sat in splendid isolation inside his camouflaged mobile caravan, Tactical Headquarters (Tac), surrounded by his pet dogs and birds. His three caravans served as his office, sleeping quarters, and map room. His personal wood-paneled caravan had once belonged to an Italian general and was captured from Rommel during the campaign in Libya. The largest single component of this mobile headquarters was the Signals Service, capable of receiving top secret Ultra and other coded messages. The Tac staff consisted of his chief of staff, Major General Francis de Guingand, and a team of young liaison officers acting as Monty's eyes and ears. Senior officers rarely visited, and VIPs and other visitors were only grudgingly accepted by Monty.

  Thus isolated from typical headquarter politics, personalities, and leadership pressure, Montgomery was totally absorbed in battlefield tactics, and all else fell by the wayside. He believed, “A commander must have time to think.”14

  Montgomery was not a team player, and his self-imposed aloofness in command also inflated his ego to the point of tragic overconfidence in his “plan.” It accentuated his unwillingness to confide in anyone, including Brooke, Dempsey, de Guingand, Eisenhower, or Bradley, about how to move the Allied forces forward.15

  What was behind Montgomery's thinking that might help explain his slowness in taking Caen? Why had he suddenly shifted the “plan” from a British-Canadian-led offensive breakout strategy to one of limited attacks?

  Britain had been at war since 1939. Churchill made it very clear to Montgomery that the United Kingdom was saddled with huge war debts, a declining industrial base, and a manpower pool weakened by 500,000 empire casualties after almost five years of war. Although Britain had mobilized the highest percentage of its population of all the combatant nations (over four million), it was reaching the end of its manpower reserves. Churchill feared that the manpower situation would diminish his influence with Roosevelt and his status in the “Big Three Conferences” with Roosevelt and Stalin in deciding the postwar future of Europe.

  By July 17 British and Canadian losses were 37,563. Though actual D-Day casualties had been fewer than expected, the situation went rapidly downhill afterward. British infantry casualties were 80 percent higher than estimated, with fewer and fewer available replacements.16

  In mid-July Adjutant General Sir Ronald Adam was sent by the War Office to warn Montgomery and Dempsey that replacements would run out during the next few weeks. They would have to “cannibalize” (i.e., break up) some divisions to maintain the rest.17

  Montgomery had to live with the fact that the Second Army was shrinking with each passing week. As he wrote to Alan Brooke, “The Second Army is now very strong; it has in fact reached its peak and can get no stronger; it will in fact get weaker as the manpower situation begins to hit us.”18

  Only after the war did Montgomery publicly acknowledge that the serious British manpower shortage caused him to change his “plan” on taking Caen. In an unpublished interview he admitted,

  We were short of ammunition, we were short of troops…. If we had failed [to take Caen], we would have been forced on the defensive. We might have had such losses that we could not even hold the ground we had…. You must remember that the British Army was a wasting asset. We had not the manpower to replace heavy casualties. The War Office told me before D-Day that it could guarantee replacements only for the first month…. It would have been very easy for me to yield to the public criticism and the American pressure and to have made greater efforts to gain ground on this flank. It might have helped my immediate reputation but it would have crippled the British Army.19

  Montgomery believed that a major sustained British offensive to take Caen would lead to heavy casualties. Instead throughout
June, July, and early August he mounted a whole series of limited attacks. In the long run, Monty's attrition strategy failed. The failure to take Caen quickly stalled the entire Allied offensive and resulted in heavy British infantry casualties.

  Montgomery became an “attrition general” who paradoxically could not afford to fight attrition battles. In Normandy he re-tailored his battle plans that supposedly would compensate for these British-Canadian manpower limitations.

  The set-piece battle was the forte of Montgomery and many other British commanders. As at El Alamein, this strategy allowed him to concentrate his forces—“tidy up,” then cautiously and methodically “grip” the battle according to his set “plan.”

  At Caen and afterward to the end of the war, Monty's limitation was his lack of quick exploitation to follow up rapidly on battlefield success. As Bradley and Patton later pointed out, Monty's insistence on a “tidy” front slowed down his advance and allowed the enemy to reestablish a new defensive line that in the long run cost him more casualties and greater delay.20

  On D-Day his “plan” to take Caen by assault failed miserably. Monty then modified his original scheme from offense to attrition, but he never admitted it. Colonel Christopher Daronay, a member of his tactical staff headquarters, wrote that Montgomery tried to “make himself bigger by saying he planned it all beforehand. He didn’t.”21 Montgomery gloried in being the great general, the hero of El Alamein. “He did not feel able,” says his biographer Alun Chalfont, “to admit to any weakness at all. Everything must be seen as run on oiled wheels along carefully laid tracks.”22

  Montgomery's operational approach was a holdover from his World War I experience on the western front—use a “colossal crack” to hit the enemy with devastating modern firepower. In the opinion of historian Antony Beevor, “The idea that high explosives saved British lives became almost addictive.”23

  Montgomery's “colossal crack” battlefield strategy proved to be very misleading for his Allied partners. Time and time again Montgomery seemed to promise the desired breakthrough but only delivered massed Allied firepower and a half-hearted infantry/armor general assault.

  SACK MONTGOMERY

  Thus the stage was set for a major effort to remove Montgomery from his command of the Allied ground forces. The small size of the Normandy bridgehead was only 20 percent of what had been expected by the first half of July. The Allies needed more room to mount a successful breakout.

  In early July 1944, Churchill was very angry as he believed that the World War I stalemate was being repeated. His government would not survive another holocaust, such as the Somme battles of World War I (over 400,000 British casualties). These fears were not groundless. According to historian Max Hastings, the infantry rates of loss in Normandy before the breakout were comparable with those of 1916.24 Churchill feared it might be a year before a breakout. A protracted war might end his government and see Britain's decline. The specter of earlier failures at Gallipoli in World War I that had been wrongly blamed on him, and Norway and Greece in the current conflict, closed in upon him.

  On the evening of July 6 Churchill met with Brooke and viciously excoriated Montgomery's generalship. Brooke recorded in his diary that at 10:00 p.m. he had a “frightful meeting” with Winston that lasted until 2:00 a.m. “He began to abuse Monty because operations were not going faster…that he was over cautious. I flared up and asked him if he could not trust his generals for five minutes instead of continuously abusing them and belittling them…. He was furious with me, but I hope it may do some good in the future.”25

  Brooke's policy as chief of staff was to offer advice and criticism but leave the commander on the spot free to make his operational decisions. Throughout the war Brooke was generally successful in fending off Churchill's impulses to intervene in military decisions, although this made for a stormy relationship between these two leaders.

  In this instance Brooke was successful with Churchill, who backed down on replacing Montgomery. Brooke had complete faith in Montgomery's operational judgment. “I don’t interfere with him. He is an incomparable tactician.”26 Brooke's blank-check faith in Montgomery's command decisions would often be misplaced during OVERLORD and afterward.

  Montgomery's lack of success in achieving a breakout in Normandy and his overarching, self-aggrandizing personality also made him a target of resentment at SHAEF, now led by Tedder, Eisenhower's deputy. The British officers began seeking to have Monty sacked. The American officers at SHAEF also joined in and pushed hard for Eisenhower to replace Montgomery as Allied ground force commander.

  But Ike remained very reluctant to do this even though Churchill had intimated that he would back him if he decided that a British commander needed to be replaced. This occurred a few days after the Normandy landings when he met with Churchill and Brooke. After the war Eisenhower recalled that Churchill was particularly disappointed over Montgomery's failure to capture Caen on D-Day. Churchill told Ike that as the supreme commander he could sack any British officer “no matter what his rank,” by telling him and General Brooke, “and the individual would be promptly removed!”27 Since Montgomery was the target of Churchill's immediate anger, it appeared to Eisenhower that even Monty was not exempt from removal if the ground campaign stalled.

  But Eisenhower's only response at this juncture was to attempt to push Montgomery forward by writing him a long pleading letter on July 7: “We have not yet attempted a major full-dress attack on the left flank [the British position] supported by everything we could bring to bear.” Ike told Monty that they must all make “a determined effort to prevent a stalemate.”28

  The next day Monty assured Ike that the campaign was under control and moving forward: “I am, myself, quite happy about the situation. I have been working throughout on a very definite plan…. I think the battle is going very well…. [This was while CHARNWOOD was grinding to a premature halt.] There will be no stalemate.”29

  Another means that Eisenhower could have used to end the Normandy stalemate was to take command of the land battle as had been originally intended after the Allied bridgehead was established. Various weak excuses have been offered as to why Eisenhower hesitated to take the reins of command, including that he lacked a command post in Normandy, that he needed Churchill's approval, or such action would destabilize the Anglo-American alliance.

  These were contributing issues, but it is now apparent that Eisenhower always preferred only having executive control over a military operation and allowing the other Allied commanders to direct the day-to-day ground battle. This was the established pattern of his earlier command experiences in North Africa, Sicily, and Italy. Both Brooke and Montgomery saw Eisenhower's command style as continuing evidence that he was only a political general and had neither the experience nor ability to lead the ground campaign.

  Alas for the Allied command, OVERLORD badly needed Ike's direct intervention at decisive moments to cap the victory. As we will see, this command failure would compound the shortcomings of his subordinates.30

  CAEN CONUNDRUM CONTINUED

  Montgomery revealed the “very definite plan” previously mentioned to Eisenhower at a July 10 conference with Bradley and Dempsey in his command caravan near Bayeux. He outlined a two-pronged envelopment campaign involving both the British/Canadian and American forces. Dempsey had proposed a major attack with three armored divisions to overrun Caen and break out into the Falaise plain. Although Montgomery balked at first, after three days he agreed to the Dempsey plan, now code-named Goodwood (the second operation named after a British racecourse, Epsom being the first). Bradley was to plan the American campaign, which was subsequently given the code name COBRA.

  COBRA and GOODWOOD were both born out of past failures. Both would use massive air power to obliterate German defenses. Major armored units were to surge over enemy fortifications. Their aim was to initiate a breakout across France. However, their massive air power requirements meant they could not occur simultaneously. GOODWOOD was to la
unch on July 18 and COBRA on July 21, offering a potential double envelopment of the German defensive front.31

  Dempsey's initial GOODWOOD plan, Monty proclaimed, would “deliver a killing blow” and permanently “crush the German hold on Caen.”32 There were five phases to GOODWOOD: (1) use saturation air and naval bombardment to obliterate enemy defenses; (2) deploy 750 tanks for a wide penetration of the German front; (3) outflank both sides of the Germans in Caen's south suburbs; (4) take the Bourguébus Ridge, backbone of the German front; and (5) strike out toward Falaise. (See Map 15.)

  Monty immediately began a propaganda effort to build up this offensive. On July 12, Montgomery wrote to Eisenhower that as a result of the initial air strikes, “My whole eastern flank will burst into flames on Saturday and the operation on Monday may have far reaching results.”33 The next day he recorded in his diary, “I decided that the time had now come to strike really heavy blows designed to knock loose the present enemy shackles that are now hemming us in.”34 On July 14 he wrote to Tedder at SHAEF, “Plan if successful promises to be decisive.”35 The same day he told Brooke, “I have decided that the time has come to have a real ‘show down’ on the eastern flank and to loose a Corps of three armored divisions into the open country about the Caen-Falaise road…. The possibilities are immense.”36 Montgomery's communications so widely raised hopes at SHAEF that Eisenhower was moved to write, “I would not be at all surprised to see you gaining a victory that will make some of the ‘old classics’ look like a skirmish between patrols.”37

  Montgomery's instructions to his ground commanders, however, were far different from his public proclamations. His July 10 directive states that an Orne River bridgehead was to be established “if this can be done without undue losses.”38 On July 15 he covertly clipped GOODWOOD's wings with a written directive to Dempsey that contained much more modest goals. The British advance was to stop only a third of the way to reaching Falaise. Montgomery wrote that the objective of the operation was “[t]o gain a good bridgehead over the ORNE through CAEN, and thus to improve our positions on the eastern flank…[and] generally to destroy German equipment and personnel.”39 Monty would decide how far to push the attack. He withheld this information from SHAEF and Brooke.