‘Sit down or remain standing,’ said Montgomery crisply, so Mather stood. Around were a number of framed photographs of Monty with his fellow commanders and also a large colour picture of Rommel. Mather remembered that after the Battle of Alamein Montgomery had invited the captured General Wilhelm Ritter von Thoma to dinner.
‘Perhaps,’ Mather suggested, looking at the picture of Rommel, ‘you will have him to dine one night as you did von Thoma?’2
‘I hope so,’ Monty replied, eyeing Mather sharply with those narrow, pale eyes of his.
It is easy to understand why Mather so willingly returned to Montgomery’s staff. The chance to see great world events from the perspective of the land forces commander was irresistible. Mather would be exposed to all the senior commanders at close quarters, but it also meant joining a bevy of British and American ADCs and other liaison officers, all of whom were of similar age and of like-minded disposition. And as far as Mather was concerned, Monty was a great boss and an inspiring, brilliant general.
History has not been kind to Montgomery, particularly not over the last fifty years as one historian after another has lined up to crucify both his character and his military reputation. To a certain extent, he brought it upon himself through his monstrous ego, the crass way in which he spoke to his peers and superiors, and the very large chip that remained planted on his shoulder. Montgomery was the son of a vicar, had been refused entry into the Indian Army and had never had the easy charm of many of his contemporaries. This lack of breeding, the perceived early setbacks to his military career and his social gaucheness, in a pre-war British Army in which breeding and ready charm counted for so much, all contributed to his social inferiority complex, which he masked with haughtiness and arrogance – an arrogance that was supported by a growing self-belief. Discipline, clear thinking, preparation and sound, solid training were his watchwords, all of which had much merit. He liked to impose himself by giving the impression of absolute self-assurance. Insisting no one could smoke in his presence was another means of imposing not just his personality but his authority. His physical appearance hardly helped: he was only 5 feet 7 inches tall, had a sharp beaky nose, pale darting eyes and a clipped nasal voice, and was unable to pronounce his ‘Rs’ properly. He never particularly worried about what others thought of him, although, paradoxically, he unquestionably enjoyed the high standing in which he was held by the British public and the popularity that went with it. From comparatively humble beginnings he had risen to the top. He had shown all those who had dismissed him out of hand early in his career. On the other hand, Eisenhower had had even humbler beginnings and had managed to retain a sense of humility. Montgomery had not.
It has to be admitted, though, that most senior commanders had risen to the top with the help of ruthless ambition and had considerable egos to boot. There were exceptions, but not many. Montgomery’s great failing was his social awkwardness. He simply did not know how to interact with others. He compensated for his lack of charm by talking entirely on his own terms, regardless of what offence he might be causing. Once, in the late 1920s, this apparently confirmed bachelor had fallen in love, married and had even had a son, David. By all accounts, Monty had adored his wife, Betty, and had she lived perhaps she would have blunted some of his worst character traits and proved a gentle, caring critic rather as Clementine Churchill faithfully was to Winston. Tragically, Betty died of septicaemia in 1937, leaving Monty with a nine-year-old son and two stepsons. Her death unquestionably changed him: from then on, he dedicated his life entirely to soldiering. It has been claimed that Montgomery was autistic, a condition undiagnosed in the 1940s. Perhaps he was what is today termed ‘on the spectrum’. He certainly lacked the ability to read the emotions of others very clearly. This would cause him all manner of trouble in the weeks and months to come.
None the less, these failings of character did not mean he was a bad general and all too often since the end of the war successive historians have put their personal distaste towards his character ahead of sound historical judgement. Monty has been presented as a ‘Marmite’ character, after the British yeast-based spread which people tend to either love or hate. The reality is, of course, a lot more nuanced. Montgomery could be spectacularly rude and discourteous, and tactically he was arguably not the most imaginative. But at this stage of the war sound strategic vision and operational skill were very possibly more important for the Allied armies. Montgomery understood that, although most of the men under his command were now well trained, most were reluctant soldiers, conscripts who were in uniform only because of a global war in which they had had no choice but to participate. He also understood the Allied mantra of ‘steel not flesh’, a strategy Britain had been determined to pursue long before war had been declared and one to which the United States had been equally wedded. This meant using their global muscle and reach, their modernity and technological know-how to the greatest possible effect, allowing industrialized mass-production and mechanization to do as much of the hard work as possible and limiting the number of those in the firing line to an absolute minimum.
For the most part, this had been incredibly successful and was why, despite fighting on multiple fronts all around the world and on land, sea and in the air, the number of British and American fighting men was far, far smaller than that of the Germans, the Japanese and especially the Soviet Union. Germany and Japan had vast armies because they had neither the global reach nor industrial muscle to fight any other way. Boots on the ground had to compensate for a shortage in mechanization. It was, however, a deeply inefficient way to fight a war in the 1940s and cost them millions of lives.
However, because of this global effort in the war, because Britain had been fighting since 1939 and because her war leaders, rightly, insisted on maintaining industrial output and fighting an industrialized, mechanized war, British manpower was getting short by the summer of 1944. The British population in 1939 had been half that of Germany and could be stretched only so far, yet Britain’s war leaders had never once lost sight of their pre-war mantra, something that was very much to their credit. Up until the autumn of 1943, for example, it was not any of the armed services that had priority for manpower but actually the Ministry of Aircraft Production. Of course, Britain could have pulled men out of the factories and sent them to the front, and could have reduced the vast number of service corps supplying the front line, but that would have been to follow Germany’s lead – and look where it had got the Nazis: millions already dead and factories manned by emaciated, inefficient slave workers. That was no way to win a modern, industrialized and technologically driven war.
Britain was a democracy – perhaps not the liberal democracy of the early twenty-first century, but a freedom-loving nation all the same – and the thought of slaughtering a generation of young men for the second time in half a century was utterly repugnant to all. Those conscripts now making up around 75 per cent of Montgomery’s forces would no longer be shot at dawn for running away. They might be court-martialled and put in prison, but that might easily be considered a better option than getting oneself maimed or killed.
This was where conveying a clear sense of purpose came in and why maintaining morale was so important. The British people were weary of war, but one way to keep men fighting at the front as the endgame finally began to draw near was to make sure those men knew their generals were not callously throwing away their lives and were supporting them as well as they possibly could with arms, weapons, guns, food and medical supplies. Montgomery understood this very well, something that has to be taken into account when considering his reputation.
He also recognized that both the British and Americans had now developed a way of war that could destroy the German armies they faced. In 1918, Britain had the world’s finest and largest navy, air force and artillery. Now the Americans had a larger navy as well as air force, and, furthermore, waiting in the wings was a larger army with more guns. However, the Royal Air Force was now vast, with thousands
of heavy bombers, fighters, ground-attack aircraft, multi-role aircraft and medium bombers; the Royal Navy was, by a margin of 3:1, to take the lead in numbers of both warships and landing craft for the invasion; and the British Army’s artillery was as good and proficient as it had been back in 1918, when, arguably, it had proved decisive in winning the war.
Montgomery intended to bludgeon his way through the German opposition. What he had learned in North Africa, in Sicily and in southern Italy was that the Germans always counter-attacked. It was almost Pavlovian. He would soften up the enemy with a barrage of artillery, then send forward his infantry and tanks, which would invariably get stuck against the dogged defence of the Germans. As the forward troops began to overreach themselves, so the German forces would rise up out of their foxholes and what cover they had and expose themselves. And at that point, the full weight of fire-power would be brought down upon them.
Thus weakened, the Germans would invariably fall back, leaving in their retreat roads laid with innumerable mines, bridges blown, booby traps, as well as machine-gun crews and snipers. This would slow the Allies down, as they were not willing to bulldoze their way forward through sacrificing their men in the manner in which the Red Army had proved very willing to do. While the Allies cautiously advanced, the Germans would prepare their next position and the whole procedure would start all over again.
From Monty’s perspective, it was methodical, it took time, but it was within the realms of what could realistically be expected from the armies under his command. Central to this approach was the fire-power he could bring to bear, both from the air and from the artillery, to grind the enemy into the dust. It was no use trying to ape the small-scale tactical versatility of the Germans, because both the British and Americans were bringing large-scale industrialization to their modus operandi. This meant that the bigger the operation and the greater the number of component parts, the harder it was to operate with tactical agility. Any forward-attacking operation had to be carried out in collusion with the artillery, with the tactical air forces, with engineers, infantry and armour. Timings had to be coordinated to ensure advancing troops were not hit with friendly fire. Ammunition, reserves, fuel all had to be brought forward to maintain the necessary weight of fire. It was the constraints of wealth against the freedom of poverty; the Germans could organize themselves more quickly because they had so much less to organize.
All of this Monty understood very clearly and these considerations, as well as the Allies’ experience of being on the offensive against German forces since the autumn of 1942, were what shaped his own views on the OVERLORD plan and those of the Allied staff officers, American, British and Canadian, who were helping both to shape it and to prepare the detail.
The whole point of Operation OVERLORD was to get a foothold in France, build up sufficient weight of forces and then drive the German armies out of the country, back into Germany and force them to surrender. No one expected them to roll over. In the last war, Germany had eventually signed an armistice because they had run out of cash and had no hope of winning. That moment had passed once again in the autumn of 1941 when the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Operation BARBAROSSA, had failed, but two and a half years on, with the Germans in retreat and materially with no hope of ever regaining the initiative, they were still fighting on. The Allies knew enough about Hitler and his monstrous regime to accept that Germany would most likely slug it out to the bitter end. Some hoped that the German people might rise up and the regime implode, but few were betting on it.
The Allies also recognized that, despite their decline, Germany still posed a major threat and that a successful invasion of France was filled with a large number of stumbling blocks. What was understood totally by Allied planners was that if a cross-Channel invasion took place, then it could not, under any circumstances, fail. Ensuring enough men and materiel were landed quickly enough to secure a lodgement – a connected bridgehead – before any concentrated enemy counter-attack could be mounted was the absolute number-one priority. This didn’t just mean a success on D-Day itself, when, if deception plans worked, they would achieve tactical surprise, but also on D plus 1, D plus 2, D plus 3 and D plus 4. Those were the most critical days. Ambitious further objectives could be contemplated, but the invasion plan had to be the very best that would be likely to secure that essential lodgement. This trumped absolutely everything.
To achieve it, a terrible juggling act had to be performed and it was almost entirely down to the availability of shipping. Britain in the build-up to the invasion was awash with overwhelming numbers of troops, weapons and war materiel, but because of the limited amounts of shipping only a very small fraction of it could be delivered on D-Day itself and the days that followed. After shipping, a second major constraint was port facilities. Cherbourg was in enemy hands; so too was the much smaller Ouistreham, 10 miles north of Normandy’s largest city, Caen. Normandy did, however, have wide, deep beaches on which landing craft and larger landing ships could deposit men and materiel. But again, the numbers of these were a constraint. Landing craft and landing ships were in use in the Mediterranean – in the Battle for Italy – and especially in the Pacific, where US forces were island-hopping in the war against Japan. American – and British – industrial might was impressive, but there were tanks to build, aircraft to build, trucks, weapons, ammunition, warships, submarines and much more to be constructed and then shipped across oceans. Getting enough LSTs – landing ships, tanks – and LSIs – landing ships, infantry – especially was not just a matter of manufacture; it was also about distribution. A previously unscheduled amphibious outflanking manoeuvre at Anzio in southern Italy had kept landing craft in the Mediterranean longer than planned, then OVERLORD itself had been expanded, while a conundrum had arisen over an intended Allied landing in southern France, code-named ANVIL. Eisenhower wanted this to take place at the same time as OVERLORD, to draw enemy troops away from Normandy and to open up both ports and a further toehold in France. This, however, would impose a further strain on shipping.
From the moment that Montgomery had arrived back in England on the morning of 2 January 1944, a logistical battle had begun between what he and his planners considered necessary to achieve a successful landing and shipping production and requirements elsewhere. It is important to understand, though, that the final plan for OVERLORD was a compromise. Every single man in those planning teams wanted more.
The plan that was developed involved large numbers of people, endless conferences with air and naval chiefs and planning teams, and drew on a huge amount of source material. Among those working round the clock, for example, was Colonel Charles ‘Tick’ Bonesteel. From a family of career soldiers, Bonesteel had passed out ninth from his class at West Point, had later studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and since arriving in the European Theater of Operations, or ETO, had become a highly regarded operational planner. He had originally arrived in Britain at the height of the Blitz in early 1941 as an observer for the US Army Engineer Board, but had then joined the Combined Operations staff under Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten when Normandy had first been mooted for what was then called Operation ROUNDUP. As a result, Bonesteel had begun to study the terrain and topography of Normandy back in 1942 before helping with the planning of TORCH, the invasion of north-west Africa in November that same year. He had then joined the staff of Force 141, the planning team for the invasion of Sicily in July 1943, before returning to Britain to be acting head of plans for the US First Army under Lieutenant-General Jacob Devers. After Eisenhower’s appointment as Supreme Allied Commander, Devers had been moved and First Army given to Lieutenant-General Omar Bradley instead, an old and trusted friend and colleague of Ike’s.
Bradley had been in England only a week when Bonesteel was temporarily transferred to the planning team of 21st Army Group, where his earlier study of Normandy proved invaluable. The original draft plan for OVERLORD, for example, had called for landings on three beaches and only on the northern Norma
ndy coast. Bonesteel, however, had earlier pinpointed a further landing on the eastern flank of the base of the Cotentin Peninsula. This was immediately insisted upon by Montgomery’s planning team the moment they arrived in London.
This beach had, by 7 April, become Utah, one of five landing beaches rather than the original three put forward by the planning team early the previous year. Known as COSSAC – Chief of Staff Supreme Allied Commander – the team had been under-resourced and inevitably those early plans had been developed further since the start of the year. The point is, the eventual plan proposed by Monty had the hands of a number of others on it. With his immediate team, he outlined the basic concept, then left the army commanders – Bradley in the American western sector and Lieutenant-General Miles Dempsey in the eastern British and Canadian half – to work out their own plans. The army commanders in turn developed more detailed objectives and plans in consultation with the corps then divisional commanders, all of which had to be worked into what was feasible with the navy and air forces.
On Friday, 7 April the plans for OVERLORD and the naval operation, NEPTUNE, as well as the air plans, were first formally presented in what was dramatically called Exercise THUNDERCLAP. All the senior commanders were present at Montgomery’s headquarters at St Paul’s School. ‘This exercise,’ Monty began, ‘is being held for the purpose of putting all general officers of the field armies in possession of the whole outline plan for OVERLORD, so as to ensure mutual understanding and confidence.’3 He spoke from experience of fighting against Rommel. ‘Some of us here know Rommel well.4 He is a determined commander and likes to hurl his armour into the battle.’ Intelligence suggested they could expect to come up against sixty enemy divisions, of which as many as ten would be mobile with tanks, assault guns and so on. These were the best equipped, best trained and most experienced, as well as being the only mobile all-arms units, and, without question, they posed the greatest threat. They could also count on the enemy knowing by dusk on D plus 1 that Normandy was the main invasion front. By D plus 5, Montgomery assumed Rommel would have at least six panzer divisions near the front with which to counter-attack if he chose and that there would be considerable enemy forces in the area from D plus 4.
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