Why the Allies Won

by Richard Overy

  Whether or not the British would in the end have baulked at Overlord remains an open question. By late 1943 a great deal of planning and force preparation had already been carried out, and they risked a serious breach with a watchful ally, growing more confident of its power month by month. But in the end the decision was taken out of their hands. At the end of November the three Allied leaders agreed to meet at Teheran. Rather than argue any more with the British, American leaders planned to outmanoeuvre them. The two western Allies met first at Cairo to discuss issues from the Far East and, so the British expected, the Mediterranean. Relations between the two military staffs were poorer than ever. Brooke became uncharacteristically intemperate; Admiral King, commander of the American navy, came close on one occasion to striking him. But on issues to do with Overlord and the Mediterranean the Americans remained silent, leaving the floor to their ally. When pressed they replied that the issues would be discussed when they met with Stalin.

  On 26 November the Presidential party flew to Teheran, followed a day later by Churchill’s. Teheran was taken over by Soviet troops. On every corner stood NKVD men in plain clothes, or in their distinctive dark blue and khaki uniforms. Security was tight. In the ride from the airport Roosevelt’s place in the limousine was taken by an American security agent wearing the President’s familiar hat and cape. So anxious were American agents for Roosevelt’s safety that when the Soviet authorities announced the discovery of an assassination plot the President’s party agreed to move to the Soviet Embassy compound. The British were housed next door in their Legation buildings. The close proximity of Soviet and American staffs gave some cause for concern because it was assumed that Roosevelt’s rooms might be bugged. It is now known that Soviet security agents concealed the devices so carefully they were never detected; Stalin received a report every day, astonished at his ally’s carelessness. ‘It’s bizarre,’ he is reported to have said, ‘They say everything in fullest detail!’19

  More worrying for Brooke and Churchill was the failure to discuss in advance with the Americans any of the issues that were to be laid before Stalin. For once, a heavy cold had rendered Churchill almost speechless. In bad health and worse temper he attended the opening session of the three leaders on 28 November with foreboding. The three sat at a baize-covered table. There was no agenda, at Roosevelt’s insistence. Before Churchill could say anything Roosevelt outlined Overlord. Stalin’s reply was everything the Americans could have hoped for. He said that Overlord was essential to bring the German army to defeat: ‘Make Overlord the basic operation for 1944.’ When Churchill finally growled out an Aegean alternative it was too late. Stalin dismissed the whole idea as a wasteful diversion. The following day the Soviet-American alliance held the field. When Churchill tried to raise the Mediterranean again, Stalin stared directly across the table at him: ‘Do the British really believe in Overlord?’ Churchill was undone. He ‘glowered, chomped on his cigar’ and finally spat out that it was indeed ‘the stern duty’ of his country to invade.20

  In a few hours of negotiation Stalin achieved what the Americans had failed to get in eighteen months of frustrating argument. Stalin liked Overlord; so too did Roosevelt. There was little Churchill could now do to keep other strategic options open. The following day a magnificent dinner was put on at the British Embassy for Churchill’s 69th birthday. This time it was Stalin’s turn to feel discomfited. He was so ill-at-ease with the array of cutlery on the table before him that he asked the British interpreter to instruct him when each item should be used. Churchill was good-humoured at last, briefly the centre of attention.21 Exaggerated toasts were drunk to the good health of each party. But for Churchill respite was short-lived. The following day Stalin insisted on a firm date for Overlord. The first of May was agreed. Then he demanded the immediate appointment of a commander for the operation as an indication of western good faith. In return he promised a Soviet offensive to coincide with the invasion. When the three leaders left Teheran they did so with a common strategy for the first time in the whole course of the conflict. Overlord was approved not on its strategic merits alone, but also to seal the alliance.

  * * *

  After two years of messy argument and uncertainty the final six months before invasion brimmed over with a bustling sense of purpose. The first step was to appoint commanders. The British had agreed at Quebec that when the time came the Supreme Commander should be an American. It was expected that Roosevelt would recommend the army Chief-of-Staff, General Marshall, who was anxious to prove that he was more than a desktop soldier. But the President realised at the last moment how much he relied on his military manager, and chose instead the man who had assumed the overall command of Allied efforts in the Mediterranean, General Eisenhower. He was a natural choice as the senior American general in Europe. After a year in the field he had much more experience than Marshall. He had a reputation as a good manager of men, a good chair for a committee. A tall, balding figure, Eisenhower (‘Ike’ to almost everyone) looked at 53 like a school headmaster in uniform – even more so when he donned his round-rimmed spectacles to read. Born in Denison, Texas, in 1890, the son of a failed storekeeper, his rise to supreme commander had much of the American Dream about it. With no money and a modest mid-West education behind him, he stumbled into an army career in which he quickly showed himself to be an energetic organiser. The First World War ended before he got to Europe. He swore to himself that he would ‘make up for this’, but he spent a fruitless twenty years stuck at the rank of major. There was nowhere to fight and little to fight with.22 On the outbreak of war he was posted to the War Department to take over as Deputy for War Plans, but not until August 1942 did he get a field command, Supreme Commander for the Torch landings in North Africa. When he arrived in Africa in November to take up his command he had never seen armed combat. His talents were managerial. His inexperience was self-evident; Brooke complained in his diary that Eisenhower had ‘absolutely no strategical outlook’. His strength was his ability to achieve ‘good cooperation’ from subordinates and allies alike. When Brooke later annotated his wartime journal he admitted that such a talent had been at a premium in preparing Overlord.23

  It was a talent that was stretched to the limit in Eisenhower’s relationship with the commander chosen by the British to storm Fortress Europe, General Bernard Montgomery. He was once again a natural choice. ‘Monty’ was the victor of the Alamein campaign which turned the tide in North Africa; he was enormously popular with the troops under his command and with the British public. Three years older than Eisenhower, he had had a fuller military career. The son of a clergyman, he followed a conventional path from public school to the British army academy at Sandhurst. In 1914 he was a lieutenant in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. He saw fierce fighting on the Western Front, was severely wounded, returned to the front and ended the war as a divisional chief-of-staff with the rank of major; two years later he saw combat again, against Sinn Fein in the struggle for Irish independence. Between the wars he was a successful staff officer; when war broke out again he was a major-general. As with Eisenhower, real responsibility came only in 1942 when Churchill chose him to take over the 8th army in Egypt and turn back the Axis armies advancing on Suez.24 He was a good organiser and a careful strategist. His bloody baptism of fire in 1914 taught him not to gamble with the lives of his men. He suffered fools not at all, and had little respect for rank and distinction. He believed that officers should get close to their men, but with fellow commanders he could be prickly and arrogant. He possessed a strong self-belief which he communicated to those below him, but it was a quality that made him intolerant of allies and colleagues where Eisenhower was a model of appeasement. The eventual success of their awkward partnership owed more to Eisenhower’s self-restraint than it did to any diffidence on the part of Montgomery.

  On one thing both men were agreed: the invasion plan drawn up in the summer of 1943 was not adequate for the task. Montgomery first saw the plan on New Year’s Eve in Marr
akesh where Churchill, whose cold had deteriorated into pneumonia, was convalescing. He spent the night reading it through and reported to the Prime Minister the following morning that the plan as it stood was impracticable. Instead of a narrow beachhead and three assault divisions Montgomery recommended a much broader front with a larger attacking force of five divisions, and a concentration of air power sufficient to win air supremacy over the lodgement area.25 Eisenhower arrived at the same conclusion when he had leisure to study the plan in January. While the two men settled into new London headquarters – Montgomery at his old public school, St Paul’s in West Kensington, Eisenhower at the Supreme Headquarters (shaef) on the outskirts of London at Bushy Park – they got down to the task of drawing up a firm plan. On 21 January the command team met and agreed to widen the front of attack from the mouth of the Seine to the east coast of the Cotentin peninsula, and to put ashore five divisions in the first assault phase instead of three. The aim was to capture the port of Cherbourg as soon as possible, and to seize the town of Caen in order to provide suitable bases from which to build up Allied air power. Once ashore it was planned to build up a secure lodgement using 37 divisions already stationed in Britain, until sufficient strength was ashore to break out from the bridgehead and push the German armies back across France.26

  The decision to expand the invasion force made unavoidable a further postponement. The extra divisions and the wider front meant more landing craft and larger supplies. So narrow was the margin in the supply of vessels for amphibious assault that the necessary craft could only be secured by waiting for an extra month for the next consignment from American dockyards, and by abandoning the idea of a subsidiary assault on southern France which Stalin had warmly supported at Teheran. Instead of a pincer movement, the Allies had to settle for a frontal assault. The southern attack, codenamed ‘Anvil’, was put on ice, though not terminated. On 1 February the two staffs agreed on a date of 31 May for the invasion, subject to the state of the tides and the moon. These were small but critical considerations. There were only a small number of days in the early summer when adequate moonlight for the crossing coincided with low-tide at dawn to permit the landing craft to negotiate the many obstacles thrown across the beaches by the enemy. The ideal dates were easily calculated. The nearest to 31 May were the 5th, 6th and 7th of June, but the first of these dates provided optimum conditions. When in May Eisenhower had to make a final decision on the date he chose as D-Day 5 June, with H-Hour, the very moment of attack, at 5.58 in the morning.27

  It was a plan of attack fraught with difficulty. An army of officials and officers, more than 350,000 men and women, laboured behind the scenes on routine issues of supply and recruitment. The organisation of training and troop deployment across 3,000 miles of ocean constituted a major feat of logistics. Dull though it seems on paper, the work of the long tail of non-combatants behind the Allied fist was vital to the success of the operation. Between January and June 1944 almost 9 million tons of supplies were shipped across the Atlantic, and some 800,000 troops, while almost four and a half million soldiers waited at bases in the United States.28 But the critical issues remained those of operations rather than organisation. Allied leaders recognised that the margin between success and failure was slim indeed, and would rest in the end on three factors: the ability to maintain the momentum of supply to the Allied beachhead before capture of a major port on the French coast; the ability to restrict the build-up of German reserves for a powerful counter-thrust; and finally the necessity, forlorn though the prospect seemed at first, of keeping hidden from the enemy the direction and timing of the invasion.

  The first of these was essentially a naval matter. Although the primary object of Overlord was to move a large army to fight in France, it relied for success on the movement of a vast armada of shipping, and the regular supply of seaborne troops and equipment for weeks after the initial landing. Indeed the whole campaign could only be contemplated by major naval powers. For all the attention lavished by historians on the land battle in Normandy, Overlord was a classic example of Admiral Mahan’s famous dictum that the sea rules the land. The naval operation was given a different codename, ‘Neptune’, and was placed under the command of a British officer, Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay. He had no illusions about what lay ahead: it was to be ‘the largest and most complicated operation ever undertaken’. His task was to marshal and load almost seven thousand vessels with men and supplies, move them from around the British coastline to pre-arranged assembly points in the Channel, and then to shepherd them through marine pathways cleared of mines towards an enemy shoreline in unpredictable seas.29 Thanks to the experience of four years of convoy planning, the movement of ships could be arranged almost like clockwork. This was a task for which British and American seamanship was well equipped. The difficult part of Ramsay’s brief was to keep those supply lanes open day and night with nowhere for ships to sit at anchor secure from the elements. During the invasion itself eight convoys a day sailed for France. Even a captured port – Cherbourg, or Le Havre – would need time to be returned to working order following almost certain German demolition.

  The solution arrived at seemed so fantastic that the German authorities never guessed it. The Allies brought their harbours with them across the Channel. The idea was the brainchild of a British naval officer, Commodore Hughes-Hallett, who in 1942 began to work on plans for the construction of artificial harbours. The scheme was not finally approved until the Quebec conference, when Allied staffs agreed to establish two harbours, codenamed ‘Mulberries’, off the French coast. Each one was constructed from long concrete sections 200 feet in length, which had to be towed by tug across the Channel and secured in place. These formed the harbour walls. Inside each were large floating steel structures designed to provide additional shelter, from which ran long piers and roadways to the shore. It was subsequently decided to set up a second breakwater to reduce the tidal strain on the Mulberries. These were known as ‘Gooseberries’, and were to be made in situ from the hulks of old ships. The 55 merchant and naval vessels chosen for sacrifice were gathered together in Scottish ports and sailed to France on D-Day, where they were scuttled in five different places. In all some four hundred separate pieces made up the artificial anchorage. Together they weighed 1.5 million tons; ten thousand men were employed on D-Day towing them to France and building the harbours.30 Though in the event only one worked fully, enough supplies rolled across the 12 miles of artificial pier to keep Allied armies provisioned in the first critical weeks.

  The second task, limiting the German build-up after D-Day, was more difficult. Great hope was placed upon strategic deception, which was orchestrated in ways to keep alive Allied threats to the Balkans and Norway, and to disguise the exact landing point in France. The success of these efforts, as we shall see, kept German forces dispersed around Fortress Europe well after invasion had begun. But such deceits could not stop the immediate reinforcement of the invasion area. For this the Allies turned to air power. Eisenhower was convinced that the only sure way to retard the German build-up was to damage the French communications system so severely that troop movements that should take a matter of hours would take days instead. In January 1944 his deputy commander, the British Air Marshal Tedder, and the British scientist Solly Zuckerman, drew up a plan to attack the railway system in France for ninety days before invasion, hitting over a hundred marshalling and repair yards before turning to the coastal areas and the destruction of German air defences. Straightforward enough on paper, the plan turned out to be anything but straightforward in practice.31

  Eisenhower had reckoned without the self-interest of all those parties with a stake in the bombing effort. Spaatz and Harris, who commanded the American and British heavy-bombers, were united in their hostility to the transport plan. Some of the attacks on rail targets were the responsibility of the fighter-bombers and light-bombers of the tactical air forces assigned to Overlord, but Eisenhower had no doubt that the heavy-bombers were essenti
al to the success of the operation. The problem was not one of feasibility. Spaatz thought the Overlord attacks were ‘child’s play’ compared with strategic bombing; Harris had recently introduced tactical changes in bomb attack which greatly increased the accuracy of night-time bombing of limited targets.32 Precision was less of an issue though thousands of French people died in the attacks. The problem was one of strategic priorities. The bomber commanders wished to continue attacks on the German aircraft industry and oil supply in the belief that this would weaken German resistance to invasion more surely than attacks on railway lines. They regarded the Overlord campaign as an unnecessary diversion of effort when bombing was on the point of achieving decisive, possibly war-winning results. They won powerful allies, including Churchill and Brooke. Eisenhower’s calm imperturbability was, for once, thoroughly punctured. By March he was all for resigning rather than battle any longer with the ‘prima donnas’: ‘I will tell the Prime Minister to get someone else to run this damn war. I’ll quit!’33

  But there was worse to come. Not only would Harris and Spaatz not accept the strategy for Overlord, they also refused point-blank to relinquish command of the heavy-bombers to Eisenhower’s air commander, Air Marshal Trafford Leigh-Mallory. Again they had Churchill’s backing, a spoiling action that Eisenhower deeply resented. Early in March he squabbled so violently with the Prime Minister over command of the heavy-bombers that he finally threatened ‘to go home’.34 The threat was enough. On the issue of command a compromise was reached. Leigh-Mallory was excluded, but for operations in support of Overlord Eisenhower and Tedder had temporary command of the heavy-bombers. This still left unresolved the more serious issue of what to bomb. Eisenhower’s headquarters were bombarded with objections to the transport plan throughout March. Spaatz told his staff that Overlord was doomed. On 25 March Eisenhower called all his critics together for a final decision, almost at the end of his tether. The result was another compromise. The transportation plan was accepted, while the bomber forces were allowed to continue attacks against oil installations and the aircraft industry when the opportunity arose. Honour appeared satisfied.35