Overlord (Pan Military Classics) Read online

  To

  HARRY

  in the hope that beaches will mean no more to him than buckets and spades

  Contents

  List of Maps

  List of Illustrations

  Foreword

  Prologue

  1 » ‘Much the greatest thing we have ever attempted’

  2 » Preparations

  Commanders; Airmen; Invaders; Defenders

  3 » To the Far Shore

  The overture; The American beaches; The British beaches; Inland

  4 » The British Before Caen

  Closing the lines; Villers-Bocage; EPSOM

  5 » The Americans Before Cherbourg

  The bocage; The battle for Cherbourg

  6 » The German Army: Stemming the Tide

  Soldiers; Weapons

  7 » The Battlefield

  From the beachhead to the front; Casualties

  8 » Crisis of Confidence

  The fall of Caen; GOODWOOD

  9 » The Breakout

  COBRA; The limits of air power

  10 » The Open Flank

  11 » The Road to Falaise

  12 » The Gap

  Appendix A: Chronology of the Normandy Campaign

  Appendix B: Allied Order of Battle

  Appendix C: Forces available in ETO for Operation OVERLORD, D-Day, 6 June 1944

  Appendix D: German land forces encountered by the Allies in Normandy

  Appendix E: Some British administrative statistics

  Bibliography and a note on sources

  Notes and references

  Glossary

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  Maps

  The Build-Up of Allied Forces

  The Disposition of German Forces on D-Day

  The Landings

  D-Day: the Push for Caen

  The Villers-Bocage Battle: 11–14 June

  Operation EPSOM: 26 June to 1 July

  The Cherbourg Peninsula: 6–30 June

  Operation GOODWOOD: 18–20 July

  Operation COBRA: 25 July

  The Mortain Counter-Attack: 6–12 August

  The Allied Breakout

  The Falaise Gap: 16–21 August

  Illustrations

  Mustang fighter-bomber

  Panzer IV

  Churchill Crocodile

  Panther

  MG 42 machine-gun

  Sherman M4AI

  Tiger

  17-pounder anti-tank gun

  88 mm dual-purpose gun

  Panzerfaust 30 anti-tank weapon

  Nebelwerfer mortar

  Typhoon IB

  Foreword

  The struggle for Normandy was the decisive western battle of the Second World War, the last moment at which the German army might conceivably have saved Hitler from catastrophe. The post-war generation grew up with the legend of the Allied campaign in 1944–45 as a triumphal progress across Europe, somehow unrelated to the terrible but misty struggle that had taken place in the East. Today, we can recognize that the Russians made a decisive contribution to the western war by destroying the best of the German army, killing some two million men, before the first Allied soldier stepped ashore on 6 June 1944. It is the fact that the battle for Normandy took place against this background which makes the events of June and July so remarkable. Much has been written about the poor quality of the German troops defending the Channel coast. Yet these same men prevented the Allies almost everywhere from gaining their D-Day objectives, and on the American Omaha beach brought them close to defeat, even before the crack units of the SS and the Wehrmacht approached the battlefield. In the weeks that followed, despite the Allies’ absolute command of sea and air, their attacks were repeatedly arrested with heavy loss by outnumbered and massively outgunned German units. None of this, of course, masks the essential historical truth that the Allies eventually prevailed. But it makes the campaign seem a far less straightforward affair than chauvinistic post-war platitudes suggested. Captain Basil Liddell Hart suggested in 1952 that the Allies had been strangely reluctant to reflect upon their huge superiority in Normandy and draw some appropriate conclusions about their own performance: ‘There has been too much glorification of the campaign and too little objective investigation.’1 Even 40 years after the battle, it is astonishing how many books have been published which merely reflect comfortable chauvinistic legends, and how few which seek frankly to examine the record.

  It remains an extraordinary feature of the war in the west that, despite the vast weight of technology at the disposal of the Allies, British and American soldiers were called upon to fight the German army in 1944–45 with weapons inferior in every category save that of artillery. Only in the air did the Allies immediately achieve absolute dominance in Normandy. Yet if the massive air forces denied the Germans the hope of victory, their limitations were also revealed. Air power could not provide a magic key to victory without huge exertions by the ground forces.

  Post-war study of the campaign has focused overwhelmingly upon the conduct of the generals, and too little attention has been paid to the respective performance of German, British and American ground troops. How could it be that after the months of preparation for OVERLORD, Allied armoured and infantry tactics in Normandy were found so wanting? The British, to a far greater degree than their commanders confessed even years after the campaign, were haunted by fear of heavy infantry casualties. I believe that Brooke and Montgomery’s private perceptions of the campaign – and perhaps those of Bradley, too – were profoundly influenced by the knowledge that the German army was the outstanding fighting force of the Second World War, and that it could be defeated by Allied soldiers only under the most overwhelmingly favourable conditions. In Normandy, the Allies learned the limitations of using explosives as a substitute for ruthless human endeavour. It seems fruitless to consider whether an Allied plan or manoeuvre was sound in abstract terms. The critical question, surely, is whether it was capable of being carried out by the available Allied forces, given their limitations and the extraordinary skill of their enemies.

  Few Europeans and Americans of the post-war generation have grasped just how intense were the early OVERLORD battles. In the demands that they made upon the foot soldier, they came closer than any other in the west in the Second World War to matching the horror of the eastern front or of Flanders 30 years earlier. Many British and American infantry units suffered over 100 per cent casualties in the course of the summer, and most German units did so. One American infantryman calculated that by May 1945, 53 lieutenants had passed through his company; few of them left it through transfer or promotion. The commanding officer of the 6th King’s Own Scottish Borderers found, when his battalion reached Hamburg in 1945, that an average of five men per rifle company and a total of six officers in the unit were all that remained of those with whom he had landed in Normandy in June 1944. ‘I was appalled,’ he said. ‘I had no idea that it was going to be like that.’ He, like the Allied nations at large, had been conditioned to believe that industrialized warfare in the 1940s need never match the human cost of the earlier nightmare in France. Yet for those at the tip of the Allied spearhead, it did so.

  This, then, is a portrait of a massive and terrible clash of arms redeemed for the Allies, but not for the Germans, by final victory. The early narrative of the background to the landings and their initial stages will be familiar to some readers, but its inclusion seems necessary for the sake of completeness, and it makes such a marvellous tale that it bears retelling. Thereafter, I have tried to examine much less closely studied aspects of the armies’ tactics and performance, and to consider some unpalatable truths about what took place in the summer of 1944.
Because Normandy was a vast campaign, it is impossible to retrace the history of every battle and every unit in detail, without achieving the tedium and bulk of an official history. By focusing upon the fortunes of a few individuals and units at different moments of the campaign, I hope that I have been able to give an impression of the experiences and difficulties endured by thousands of others. I have described each nation’s sectors of the front in separate chapters, even at the cost of some loss of chronology, because only thus can the progress of the armies be considered coherently. Where I have quoted men by name, the ranks given are those that they held at the date concerned. I have adopted American spellings for American units and direct quotations from American personnel. I have made little mention of material that is familiar to every student of war history – Group-Captain Stagg’s weather forecasting problems, the commanders’ formal statements, the airborne operations on D-Day – which have been exhaustively described in other books. Instead, I have concentrated upon aspects which I hope will be less familiar: the battle inland and the personal experiences of men whose stories have never been told before, above all the Germans. The German army’s achievement in Normandy was very great, and I have sought out many of its survivors. I have tried to write dispassionately about the German soldier’s experience without reference to the odiousness of the cause for which he fought.

  I have interviewed scores of American and British veterans, and corresponded with hundreds more. I am especially indebted to Field-Marshal Lord Carver, Field-Marshal Sir Edwin Bramall, General Sir Charles Richardson, Major-General G. P. B. Roberts, Major-General Sir Brian Wyldbore-Smith, General Elwood R. Quesada, General James Gavin and Brigadier Sir Edgar Williams. I also owe much to the librarians of the London Library, the Royal United Services Institution, the Staff College Camberley and the Public Record Office. For this, as for my earlier books, Bomber Command and Das Reich, Andrea Whittaker has been a splendid German interpreter and translator. Among the host of relevant literature, I must pay tribute to Nigel Hamilton’s latest volume of his official biography of Lord Montgomery, and to Carlo D’Este’s important recent study of the strategy of the Normandy campaign, both of which I was able to consult in the later stages of writing this book, and which were invaluable in causing me to consider some issues and some documents which would otherwise have passed me by. As always, I owe a great deal to the patience and forbearance of my wife Tricia who, having endured in recent years my spiritual life in a Lancaster at 20,000 feet and in the midst of occupied France, has now spent many months amidst the ruins of Caen and St Lô. Carlo D’Este and Andrew Wilson MC were kind enough to read the completed manuscript and to make helpful suggestions and corrections, although of course they share no responsibility for the narrative and the judgements, which are entirely my own. I am also greatly indebted to my editor in London, Giles O’Bryen, to Philippa Harrison, and to Alice Mayhew in New York.

  Perhaps I should also avow a debt of gratitude to the British Army and the Royal Navy. One morning early in April 1982, I was sitting at my desk in Northamptonshire seeking to make the leap of imagination that is essential to books of this kind, to conceive what it was like to crouch in a landing craft approaching a hostile shore at dawn on 6 June 1944. By an extraordinary fluke of history, less than two months later I found myself crouched in a British landing craft 8,000 miles away. In the weeks that followed, I had an opportunity to witness an amphibious campaign whose flavour any veteran of June 1944 would immediately have recognized, even to the bren guns, Oerlikons and Bofors hammering into the sky. I would like to think that the experience taught me a little more about the nature of battles, and about the manner in which men fighting them conduct themselves. It has certainly made me all the more grateful that my generation has never been called upon to endure anything of the scale and ferocity that encompassed the men who fought in Normandy.

  Max Hastings

  Guilsborough Lodge,

  Northamptonshire

  October 1983

  Prologue

  On the night of 9 May 1940, Lieutenant John Warner did not reach his bed until 2.00 a.m. Along with the other officers of the Royal West Kents deployed along the Belgian frontier with the British Expeditionary Force, he had been celebrating in the mess amid the traditional rituals of the British army, with the regimental bands beating retreat in the little town square of Bailleul. It was unusual for all three battalions of a regiment to be campaigning – if the ‘bore war’ in France could be dignified as such – alongside each other, and their party did justice to the occasion.

  They were asleep a few hours afterwards when they were forced to take notice of ‘some enormous banging all over the place’.1 The German offensive in the west had begun. As the West Kents hastily prepared to march that morning of 10 May (caching the band instruments which they would never see again) it is a measure of the British army’s collective delusion that they were ordered to advance to the Scheldt and to expect to remain there for some months.

  In reality, they occupied their positions on the river for just four days before a trickle, and then a stream, of Allied soldiers began to pass through them towards the rear. Rumours drifted back also that ‘the French had packed it in down south’. Their colonel, Arthur Chitty, hated the enemy with all the fervour of a regular soldier who had been captured in the first weeks of war in 1914 and spent four years behind the wire. Now, he organized the pathetic deployment of their Boyes anti-tank rifles in an antiaircraft role. Shortly afterwards, the Germans arrived.

  The 4th West Kents were deployed along the river bank. For reasons best known to itself, the battalion on their right chose to take up positions some way back from the waterline. As a result, the enemy was quickly able to seize a bridgehead on the British side, threatening the flank of the 4th. John Warner, a 23-year-old solicitor from Canterbury with a Territorial Army commission, claimed that, ‘as a lawyer, I was a cautious chap who always liked to look round corners before turning them’. Yet he found himself leading a succession of headlong charges against the Germans with his bren-gun carrier platoon which resulted in what he later called ‘a very interesting little battle’, and won him the Military Cross. The West Kents held their ground, but they were outflanked and soon forced to withdraw, their rear covered by the Belgians. In the days that followed, driving and marching north-westwards along the dusty roads, they fought one more significant action against the Germans in the forest of Nieppe, but found themselves chiefly confounded by the appalling traffic jams clogging the retreat, refugees and British vehicles entangled upon roads endlessly strafed by the Luftwaffe. Warner and his carrier platoon struck off across country to escape the chaos, which was fortunate, because shortly afterwards the Germans struck the main column, capturing the entire headquarters of the 1st West Kents, just ahead of the 4th. The young officer was dismayed by a brief visit to divisional headquarters, where ‘control had broken down completely’. Morale among his own men remained surprisingly high, but the enemy had achieved absolute psychological dominance of the battlefield. ‘We thought the Germans were very good. In fact, we overestimated them,’ said Warner. Like so many others, the West Kents bitterly cursed the absence of the Royal Air Force, and became practised at leaping into ditches at the first glimpse of an aircraft.

  When they reached the Dunkirk perimeter, Warner was ordered to abandon his vehicles. But having brought them intact every yard of the way from the Scheldt, he stubbornly drove into the British line, and handed over the carriers to one of the defending battalions. For the next three days, he sat in the sand dunes waiting for rescue, with a motley group of some 60 men who had gathered around him. He thought miserably: ‘Here I am with an MC in the field, and now I’m going in the bag.’ On the third day, he wearied of hanging about where he had been told to, and marched his men determinedly onto the Dunkirk mole, where he parlayed them a passage on an Isle of Man pleasure steamer. Thus, sleeping the sleep of utter exhaustion on the sunlit decks, they sailed home to England.

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p; Curiously enough, while senior officers and statesmen were vividly aware that Britain had suffered catastrophe, once the young men of the BEF were home, very few saw their misfortunes in such absolute terms. It is the nature of soldiers to take life as it finds them from day to day. In the months and years that followed Dunkirk, John Warner shared the British army’s dramas and anti-climaxes, abrupt moves and lengthy stagnations, leaves and exercises, promotions and changes of equipment. He spent some months defending Romney Marshes, ‘prepared to do or die’. A keen young soldier, he wrote to the legendary apostle of armoured warfare, Captain Basil Liddell Hart, explaining that he had mislaid his copy of the author’s The Future of Infantry during the goings-on in France. Liddell Hart sent him a new one.

  Warner never consciously considered the prospect of going back to fight against the German army in France until one day in 1942, when he attended an officers’ conference in Doncaster addressed by his corps commander, Lieutenant-General Frederick Morgan. Morgan astonished them by expounding upon future landings across the Channel, ‘talking of how we were going to stream across north-west Europe with huge tank power. For the first time, we did start to think seriously about going back.’ The conference addressed itself to some tactical problems. An officer inquired how advancing forces would indicate their progress. ‘They can set fire to the villages they pass through,’ said Morgan unanswerably. Not only new armies, new equipment, would be critical to a landing in Europe: so also would a new spirit.

  The chance of war dictated that John Warner did not remain with the 4th West Kents, which was fortunate for him, because the battalion was sent to Burma. If he had gone with it, he would probably have died, like so many others, on the tennis court at Kohima. Instead, he was posted to become second-in-command of 3rd Reconnaissance Regiment, earmarked with its division for north-west Europe. It was with 3rd Recce that in June 1944, Major Warner returned to the battlefield from which he and his comrades had been so ruthlessly ejected four years earlier. Along with a million and a half other Allied soldiers, he went to Normandy.